Event-Related Cerebral Hemodynamic Assessment of Vigilance: Evidence in Favor of a More Temporally Precise Analysis

Abstract

Transcranial Doppler sonography (TCD) is a neuroergonomic measure used in research on vigilance tasks. The current study focused on eventrelated analysis of TCD data, a relatively novel analytical approach that has previously been used to reveal that brain activity increases briefly when an individual detects a critical, target stimulus. Although research suggests that this detection-related response is sensitive to fatigue and demand effects associated with vigilance, future use and interpretation of event-related TCD analyses is complicated by interstudy variability in the time course and magnitude of the detection-related response. One possibility is that previous methods may have been too temporally coarse (4-second averages), so the current study reanalyzed data from one previous event-related study – this time using narrower 2-second averages. Results indicated that 2-second averages provided more precise depiction of the detection-related response than 4-second averages. We recommend use of 2-second averages for future eventrelated CBFV research.