Sensory, Attentional And Perceptual Processes — Psychology STD 11 Humanities — Question

Sustained attention refers to our ability to maintain attention on an object or event for longer durations. It is also known as "vigilance,". Sometimes people have to concentrate on a particular task for many hours.

• Air traffic controllers and radar readers provide us with good example of this phenomenon. They have to constantly watch and monitor signals on screens.
• The occurrence of signals in such situations is usually unpredictable, and errors in detecting signals may be fatal.

Hence, a great deal of vigilance is required in these situations.
Several factors can facilitate or inhibit an individual's performance on tasks of sustained attention.

1. Sensory modality: Performance is found to be superior when the stimuli (called signals) are auditory than when they are visual.
2. Clarity of stimuli: Intense and long lasting stimuli facilitate sustained attention and result in better performance.
3. Temporal uncertainty: When stimuli appear at regular intervals of time they are attended better than when they appear at irregular intervals.
4. Spatial uncertainty: Stimuli that appear at a fixed place are readily attended, whereas those that appear at random locations are difficult to attend.