Counting Sheep is a Good Way to Get to Sleep, but the Occasional Aardvark Will Wake You Up: How a Salient Event Improves Performance

Sustaining attention is a problem many of us face in various settings from the workplace to school. Sustaining attention is often crucial for good performance. Vigilance decrement refers to a decline in task performance as time on task increases. The current study induces a vigilance decrement across 2000 trials of a monotonous task. In this study each trial is composed of one target and one distracter presented to the participant and the participant’s goal is to determine if the target is above or below the distracter. In the control condition, both stimuli are always presented in black font. For the experimental condition, on trial 1200 and 1900 the target is presented in red font. There are no other differences between conditions. This minor, task irrelevant change suffices to reduce the vigilance decrement relative to the control condition on all subsequent trials. We dub this phenomenon the Aardvark Effect.