The VIG training module within the NeuroMite program trains the attention dimension of vigilance – the ability to sustain attention over a lengthy period of time under monotonous stimulus conditions.
Scene and Task
Imagine you're driving along a straight highway. At irregular intervals other vehicles will come towards you on the opposite carriageway or overtake you. Your task is to react by pressing a button when an overtaking vehicle suddenly brakes in front of you. Once you have reacted the vehicle’s brake lights go out and it accelerates away from you. If you fail to react within the permitted time, the brake lights start to flash. Eventually there is a loud squealing noise, which is designed to draw your attention to what is happening.
Difficulty structure
The VIG training program has 30 difficulty levels. A decreasing stimulus frequency makes it more and more difficult for the client to sustain his attention: he is overtaken by other cars increasingly rarely, the surroundings become more monotonous as darkness falls and the number of sudden braking manoeuvres from overtaking vehicles decreases. In addition, the intensity of the feedback on delayed and omitted reactions becomes weaker as the difficulty level increases. The challenge therefore changes gradually from a sustained attention task to one requiring real vigilance.
At each difficulty level the maximum permitted reaction time adapts to the speed of the client’s reactions. Taking the client’s first valid reactions as a starting point, an individual reaction time limit is determined and used as a basis for measuring all further reactions made in the course of the training program. This ensures that from the outset the training program is optimally adapted to the client’s skill and is never either too easy or too difficult for him.
Theory
Long-term alertness tasks require the client’s attention “to be focused continuously for long periods of time on one or more sources of information, in order to detect and respond to small changes in the information presented” (Davies et al. 1984). Vigilance represents a special variant of long-term attention. Vigilance tasks make demands on attention over a long period of time – often a number of hours – and the relevant stimuli typically occur at very irregular intervals and at a very low frequency among a large number of irrelevant stimuli. Vigilance training cannot be effective unless a training session lasts for more than 30 minutes at the minimum.