Authors:

Miho Kato

Date Created:

Not specified

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About Paper:

Attention requires sustaining focus on information and goals over time. Sustained attention performance is affected by time and temporal predictability. Specifically, previous research showed that performance in sustained attention tasks decreases when the focus of attention is required to be sustained over a longer period of time, and performance increases when the duration to sustain attention is predictable (known as temporal predictability). The current research examines the relationship between the duration of sustained attention and temporal predictability with two cognitive tasks. In the Sustained Attention to Cue Task (SACT), participants were required to sustain their focus of attention on a cued location to detect a subsequent target. In the antisaccade task, participants were required to fixate on the center of the screen until a cue appeared either on the left or right side of the screen, and asked to immediately shift their attention to the opposite side to detect the target. In the data presented here, 29 young adults (13 in the unpredictable and 16 in the predictable group) completed 10 sessions with both tasks. We predicted that longer wait/fixation times would be associated with decreased accuracy, and that increased temporal predictability would enhance their sustained attention and lead to increased accuracy. Preliminary results showed that SACT performance decreased over longer wait times, regardless of temporal predictability. In the antisaccade task, performance decreased from medium to long fixation times only when the fixation duration was predictable. Keywords: Sustained Attention; Temporal Predictability

Source:

Purdue University / 2025

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Co-authors:

Miho Kato