Perception in Action Research Centre, Faculty of Human Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia; Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom; Department of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Human Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Alexandra Woolgar
Perception in Action Research Centre, Faculty of Human Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia; Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom; Department of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Human Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Anina N Rich
Perception in Action Research Centre, Faculty of Human Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia; Department of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Human Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
There are many monitoring environments, such as railway control, in which lapses of attention can have tragic consequences. Problematically, sustained monitoring for rare targets is difficult, with more misses and longer reaction times over time. What changes in the brain underpin these ‘vigilance decrements’? We designed a multiple-object monitoring (MOM) paradigm to examine how the neural representation of information varied with target frequency and time performing the task. Behavioural performance decreased over time for the rare target (monitoring) condition, but not for a frequent target (active) condition. There was subtle evidence of this also in the neural decoding using Magnetoencephalography: for one time-window (of 80ms) coding of critical information declined more during monitoring versus active conditions. We developed new analyses that can predict behavioural errors from the neural data more than a second before they occurred. This facilitates pre-empting behavioural errors due to lapses in attention and provides new insight into the neural correlates of vigilance decrements.
