Roca, J. 1 , Castro, C. 1 , López-Ramón, M. 1, 2 & Lupiáñez, J. 1
1 Facultad de Psicología. Universidad de Granada (Spain).
2 Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas-CONICET (Argentina).
The study of human attention is a key issue in understanding drivers’ behaviour and preventing road traffic accidents. Recent research has attempted to develop a quick means of measuring attentional performance and to analyse the role played by each attentional function (executive control, attentional orienting, phasic alertness, and also tonic alertness) in various cognitive psychology studies and also in applied contexts, such as in driving-related studies. In the current work, the ANTI-Vigilance (i.e., a variation of the Attentional Networks Test for Interactions that includes an additional measure of vigilance) has been used and data from a series of four different studies have been analysed together to make main findings more robust. Convergent evidence from more than 150 participants shows that the ANTI-Vigilance provides a useful direct measure of vigilance, in addition to the usual ANTI measures. Significant correlations between global performance measures (global reaction time and global accuracy averaged across conditions) and Signal Detection Theory measures of vigilance were found. These results support the idea that the global measures are indirectly related to vigilance performance. The role that these measures played in previous studies using the ANT or the ANTI tasks, especially in driving behaviour research, are now further discussed.