VIGILANCE LATENCIES TO AIRCRAFT DETECTION AMONG NORAD SURVEILLANCE OPERATORS

A function of North American Aerospace Defence (NORAD) in North Bay, O ntario, is to identify all aircraft entering Canadian airspace. The fi rst step in performing this task is to detect visually the presence of aircraft from either radar or transponder information presented on di splay consoles. This challenging, real-world vigilance task was used t o investigate factors affecting detection latencies. The experiment re vealed that performance varied as a function of geographic area of cov erage, the midnight shift was particularly sensitive to vigilance decr ements, and a vigilance decrement effect can occur in a real-world tas k, but this effect is not as strong as those reported in laboratory st udies.