ABSTRACT
Early pioneering work on vigilance was carried out at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge during the Second World War (Mackworth, 1950). This work is fully described in Chapter 1 and will not therefore be described again here. Suffice it to say that Mackworth found that vigilance decrements are very slow to appear, and that participants are capable of monitoring very boring and repetitive tasks for many hours before making significant lapses. Although not widely used since, Mackworth’s pioneering technique is still occasionally used in research today (e.g. Giambra & Quilter, 1988, Kass, Vodanovich, Stanny, & Taylor, 2001).
