Predicting sustained performance over a short time

抄録

Effort is required to sustain attention for a long period of time. A continuous performance task is a method for measuring sustained attention that requires participants to respond to frequently presented non-targets but withhold their responses to rare targets. The failure to respond to a target is considered an attentional lapse, and this is correlated with attentional fluctuation, i.e., the variance in response times to non-targets. Although the duration of this task is traditionally about 10 min, a shorter task would reduce participants’ loads and enable more widespread use of the procedure. To this end, we used a briefer continuous performance task to examine whether individual performance in the first 2 min predicted performance on the entire 8-min task. The results demonstrated that attentional fluctuation and lapses in the first 2 min were highly positively correlated with those during the entire 8 min. These findings suggest that the temporal characteristics of individual sustained attention are predictable from a brief measurement requiring only a few minutes.