Abstract
As part of a larger study on the effects of fatigue on various attentional and behavioural measures, we had participants complete a modified version of Luna et al.’s (J Neurosci Methods 306:77–87, Luna et al., J Neurosci Methods 306:77–87, 2018) ANTI-Vea task (mANTI-Vea) at the beginning and end (pre/post) of each of two 8-h testing sessions. Between these administrations of the mANTI-Vea our participants spent ~ 6 h performing an intervening task. Our intent in this project was two-fold: first, to replicate the pattern of effects reported in Luna et al.’s original presentation of the ANTI-Vea; second, to assay the impact of fatigue on vigilance and attention by observing shifts in mANTI-Vea performance as a function of time on task and before versus after the intervening task. With time-on-task (the mANTI-Vea is divided into six sub-blocks) we observed that participants became increasingly conservative in their biases to respond towards infrequent targets, showed a decline in sensitivity, and lapsed in responding in the psychomotor vigilance task with greater frequency. In the pre/post comparison, we observed an increase in the proportion of lapses, but not in participants’ response biases. Attentional network scores were found to be somewhat insensitive to our fatigue manipulations; the effect of time-on-task was only significant for orienting scores on RT, and our pre/post comparison was only significant for RT derived executive functioning scores.
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Notes
We had intended to implement the ANTI-Vea as described by Luna et al. but due to a coding error all visual cues were spatially predictive (in the original design cues were valid or invalid with equal probability).
Supplementary materials can be found on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/jqzxu/
At reviewer request, motivated by the age discrepancy between one of our participants (50 yo) and the rest of the participant pool (range: 19–3 6yo), and recent work showing age-related shifts in attentional functioning (Lufi and Haimov 2019), we additionally checked for participant outliers using the ‘Median Absolute Deviation’ procedure described in Leys et al. (2013). No participants were removed as none were flagged as outliers using this procedure.
Although our 100 ms CTOA might be be early to assess purely endogenous cuing (as might be elicited by an arrow at fixation, see, e.g., Remington and Pierce 1984) it is not too early to explore the kind of orienting a highly informative peripheral cue might generate. To be sure, the form of orienting elicited by such a cue is an indeterminate combination of exogenous and endogenous control. But there is ample evidence that the informativeness of such a peripheral cue matters for and contributes to the amount of cuing even at SOAs of 100 ms or less (e.g., Jonides 1980, Fig. 1).
Non-parametric indices were employed to replicate Luna et al.’s analysis methods, which they noted could be calculated even when hits and misses were at ceiling or floor, respectively.
A cutoff of 600 ms, as opposed to 500 ms, was used to label lapses as this cutoff was employed in Luna et al. (2018), who observed that RTs were on average 100 ms greater than that in the ANTI-V. See E2 in Luna et al. for greater detail.
Readers may be interested in how mean RT and the standard deviation of RT are affected by fatigue. In this manuscript we focus on the lapse rate because the major influence upon both mean RT and its variance is from the right tail of the RT distribution. Descriptive and statistical information about mean RT and its variability can be found in Tables 1, 8 and 13 in the on-line supplement.
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The research described here was made possible by Discovery and Engage grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to RMK.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data collection and analysis were performed by BBTF. Software used to run the experiment was written by AJH. Project guidance and oversight was provided by RMK. The first draft of the manuscript was written by BBTF, with contributions by AJH, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Communicated by Carlo Alberto Marzi.
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Feltmate, B.B.T., Hurst, A.J. & Klein, R.M. Effects of fatigue on attention and vigilance as measured with a modified attention network test. Exp Brain Res 238, 2507–2519 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-020-05902-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-020-05902-y