Objective: We review historical and more recent efforts in boredom research and related
fields. A framework is presented that organizes the various facets of boredom, particularly in …

Vigilance, or the ability to sustain attention for extended periods of time, has been of interest
to the human factors and ergonomics community for 70 years. During this time, several …

Time of day modulates our cognitive functions, especially those related to executive control,
such as the ability to inhibit inappropriate responses. However, the impact of individual …

Although reward is known to have a powerful influence on performance, its effects on the
ability to continuously sustain performance over time are poorly understood. The current …

We conducted two studies using a modified sustained attention to response task (SART) to
investigate the developmental process of SART performance and the role of cognitive load …

It is well known that when human observers must monitor for rare but critical events,
probability of detection tends to wane over time, a phenomenon known as the “vigilance …

Motivation and reward can have differential effects on separate aspects of sustained
attention. We previously demonstrated that continuous reward/punishment throughout a …

In this report, we examined the impact of rest breaks and goal switches on the vigilance
decrement—the change in performance with time-on-task—and subjective stress and …

Assessing whether someone is attending to a task has become important for educational
and professional applications. Such attentional drifts are usually termed mind wandering …

Recent advances in neuroscience and engineering have allowed increasingly accessible,
mobile, and wearable neurotechnologies that can record or alter human brain activity in …