Team Vigilance

Abstract

Operator vigilance is a vital concern to the Human Factors/Ergonomic community in regard to cockpit monitoring, air-traffic control, border security, baggage inspection, the supervisory control of unmanned aerial vehicles, and the monitoring of anesthesia gauges, among others. Of key interest is the performance of teams of observers because of the reliance of modern operations on good teamwork. Previous literature has examined the efficacy of team vigilance performance by comparing the frequency of target detections by teams in comparison to those obtained by operators working alone. Team performance has consistently exceeded singleoperator performance. The present study replicates this effect and provides the initial experimental investigation of the cost of being a team member. Results indicated that team members worked harder in terms of theta band activity, but reported similar subjective workload values when compared to that of single operators in the performance of a simulated UAV monitoring task.