Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

Sustaining attention has shown to be increasingly difficult over time, and it has become important to understand how task demands impact the maintenance of focus on any given task. Sustained attention tasks using both high and low target frequencies have measured declining performance over time. This project investigates, within a single task, how target frequency (high: 90%, low: 10%, intermediate: 50%) impacts different measures of sustained attention performance when subjects continuously monitor for subtle visual targets. As predicted, higher target frequencies showed higher false alarm rates, along with significant increases in participant responding and decreases in response times. Further, increases in target frequency predicted changes in attention, such as increased difficulty distinguishing targets from noise and a more liberal response bias. This suggests that the type of sustained attention task, in respect to target frequency, may influence subjects’ sustained attention. Future researchers should consider these differences when selecting tasks to study sustained attention. The field should incorporate tasks with a variety of target frequencies to form theories and draw conclusions about sustained attention.