López-Ramón, M. , Castro, C. , Roca, J. & Lupiañez, J.
Universidad de Granada, Spain
Experimental behavioral tasks developed for assessing cognitive processes should be adapted to sample characteristics and time demands depending on the context to which they will be applied (e.g. schools, cognitive impaired patients, etc). The ANTI-V (vigilance) task can be beneficial to be used in different contexts because it measures vigilance (plus the ANTI measures of phasic alertness, attentional orienting, and executive control) by adding the detection of infrequent, unpredictable and intermittent stimuli. The present study aims to create a useful tool that will allow the user of the ANTI-V to previously determine the sample size and the amount of experimental blocks that will be needed to obtain the expected attentional effects according to the evaluation context. Eighty participants completed the ANTI-V task. We analyzed RT measures for phasic alertness, executive control and orientation networks and SDT (Signal Detection Theory) measures for tonic alert. We performed a block analysis (2 to 7 experimental blocks, of 4 min each) of the effects for each attentional network in reduced samples of 10, 20, 30 and 40 participants. As a result of these analyses, researches will be provided with a simple and useful tool that will give robustness to the results to be obtained.