Selection for vigilance assignments: a review and proposed new direction

Vigilance or sustained attention is a critical aspect of operational tasks including air-traffic control, airport security, industrial quality control and inspection, and medical screening and monitoring. Consequently, the selection of personnel for assignments involving vigilance is a key ergonomic concern. As reviewed herein, traditional approaches to personnel selection for tasks requiring vigilance have concentrated on unidimensional measures involving sensory acuity, aptitude, sex, age and personality factors. These approaches have been ineffective. In this article, we suggest an alternative approach in which the selection issue is considered in terms of a theory-driven analysis of different types of vigilance tasks and multidimensional predictors. As an example of that approach, we made use of a resource model of vigilance and measures of cerebral blood flow velocity and subjective state obtained from a short battery of high-workload tasks to successfully predict individual performance on subsequent high-workload sensory and cognitive vigilance tasks.