Abstract
Two basic activities are involved in radar operating, watchkeeping and target tracking. Deterioration of watchkeeping performance has been explained by a hypothesis which relates absence of sensory variation and failure to attend to one part of the display continuously (Broadbent, 1951). This paper describes a preliminary experiment to examine deterioration on a simple compensatory tracking task.
Twenty-one subjects were each tested for an uninterrupted period of two hours. They were required to keep a target correctly aligned by cranking a handwheel at a constant speed, and it was expected that failures to attend to the display would result in target deviations. Analysis of the results showed that both number of errors and mean duration of errors increased significantly in consecutive half-hour periods, and that there were large individual differences in performance.
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