Prolonging the response movement inhibits the feed-forward motor program in the sustained attention to response task.

Despite widespread use in clinical and experimental contexts, debate continues over whether or not the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) successfully measures sustained attention. Altering physical aspects of the response movement required to SART stimuli may help identify whether performance is a better measure of perceptual decoupling, or response strategies and motor inhibition. Participants completed a SART where they had to manually move a mouse cursor to respond to stimuli, and another SART where this extra movement was not required, as in a typical SART.

A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study of the effects of configural properties on sustained attention.

Forty-five participants performed a vigilance task during which they were required to respond to a critical signal at a local feature level, while the global display was altered between groups (either a circle, a circle broken apart and reversed, or a reconnected figure). The shape in two of the groups formed a configurative whole (the circle and reconnected conditions), while the remaining shape had no complete global element (broken circle). Performance matched the results found in the previous experiments using this stimulus set, where a configural superiority effect was found to influence accuracy over time.

Positive post-disaster images: A daydream machine?

This study explores the impact of post-earthquake images inserted in a vigilance task, in terms of performance, self-reports of task-focus, and cerebral activity using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Vigilance tasks present a sequence of stimuli in which only a few are pre-designated critical or target stimuli requiring an overt response from the participant. Seventy-one residents participated (51 women, 20 men) by taking part in a vigilance task with task-irrelevant images inserted in the sequence.

Go-stimuli proportion influences response strategy in a sustained attention to response task.

The sustained attention to response task (SART) usefulness as a measure of sustained attention has been questioned. The SART may instead be a better measure of other psychological processes and could prove useful in understanding some real-world behaviours. Thirty participants completed four Go/No-Go response tasks much like the SART, with Go-stimuli proportions of .

The effect of task-relevant and irrelevant anxiety-provoking stimuli on response inhibition.

The impact of anxiety-provoking stimuli on the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART; Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997), and response inhibition more generally, is currently unclear. Participants completed four SARTs embedded with picture stimuli of two levels of emotion (negative or neutral) and two levels of task-relevance (predictive or non-predictive of imminent No-Go stimuli). Negative pictures had a small but detectable adverse effect on performance regardless of their task-relevance.

Friendly Fire and the Sustained Attention to Response Task.

Objective: We investigated whether losses of inhibitory control could be responsible for some friendly-fire incidents.

Background: Several factors are commonly cited to explain friendly-fire incidents, but failure of inhibitory control has not yet been explored. The Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) could be a valid model for inhibition failures in some combat scenarios.

The effects of a transition between local and global processing on vigilance performance.

Sixty participants performed a sustained attention task in which they were required to perform either global or local feature discrimination. Two groups required just one type of discrimination, while the remaining two groups started on one type of discrimination before transitioning to the other type halfway through. A transition resulted in worse performance when compared to no transition.

The configural properties of task stimuli do influence vigilance performance.

Sixty-one participants performed a sustained attention task in which they were required to respond to a critical signal requiring feature discrimination. Three separate groups performed the task with different global display configurations. The local feature elements (directional arrow shapes) were displayed on either a circle, a circle broken apart or a reconnected figure.