Advances in Vigilance Research: Exploring Novel Theoretical Models and Analytical Approaches on the analysis of the Vigilance Decrement.

When performing prolonged tasks without breaks, vigilance (i.e., the challenging ability to sustain attention during long periods) usually declines with time-on-task, a phenomenon scientifically known as “vigilance decrement”. While vigilance loss might have a minor impact in some daily life or work activities, in some other contexts (e.g., driving in a route or tracking threatening objects in security tasks), vigilance failures might lead to critical consequences. Aiming to account for the vigilance decrement phenomenon, extensive research has led to different theoretical frameworks and sensitive methods to explain vigilance failures, with a considerable effort in promoting effective strategies to mitigate vigilance loss in prolonged tasks. However, after many decades of research, there is still a lack of consensus concerning the theoretical underpinnings underlying the vigilance decrement, showing in the last years increased interest in developing new methodological approaches to assess the vigilance decrement in more contemporary scenarios.

This article collection in Frontiers in Cognition is expected to present the current status of classic (as, for instance, resources overload, arousal, and resources underload accounts as mind-wandering) as well as alternative and more recent (e.g, resources control and opportunity cost) theoretical frameworks on their predictions about the vigilance decrement phenomenon. Researchers are invited to disseminate new advances in the field of vigilance research about how classic and alternative frameworks can anticipate vigilance failures in the lab but also in more real-life and modern contexts. The research topic also aims to disseminate new methodological advances on the assessment of vigilance in more complex and contemporary scenarios. Recent progresses in the development of behavioral methods, including novel tasks and new indicators about time-on-task decrement, are encouraging to further develop vigilance research in more dynamic environments. All these recent theoretical and methodological advances are contributing to new frameworks in approaching vigilance loss not as a single and isolated component, but as a phenomenon in which multiple components (i.e., task load and demands, motivation, cognitive control, arousal, attentional allocation, among many others) seem to be critical to anticipate and reduce vigilance failures.

Contributions are expected to disseminate new advances on vigilance research, with a broad overview on methods, populations, and contexts in which vigilance research might promote novel strategies to account and mitigate vigilance failures. Behavioral but also physiological research in healthy or clinical populations are welcomed. Dissemination on novel behavioral tasks measuring the vigilance decrement, but also on new proposals on behavioral and physiological markers about changes in vigilance across time-on-task are expected. Research in applied contexts as, for instance, ergonomic advances, human-machine interaction, sports practice, security tasks, and many others daily life and work activities, are of special interest of this special issue. New investigations on phenomena associated with vigilance loss (e.g., sleep deprivation, fatigue), and recent advances in vigilance countermeasures (including, but not limited to, rest, brain stimulation, psychostimulants, and other contextual and task modulators as task load and physical salience of stimuli) are welcomed.

Theoretical progresses on vigilance frameworks are invited in the form of Systematic Review, Review, Mini Review, Hypothesis and Theory, Perspective, Conceptual Analysis, General Commentary, and Opinion articles. Empirical research on new advances in the vigilance field are invited, but not limited to, in the form of Original Research, Methods, and Brief Research Report articles.