Sources of Stress and Boredom in Vigilance

Recent studies on vigilance have shown that participants find these tasks to be boring, demanding, and stressful. Although several attempts have been made to isolate the source of workload, stress, and boredom in vigilance, none appears to account for all the results in the literature. In the present paper, a new approach is outlined that brings together research in workload, daydreaming, and boredom. Specifically, it is shown that two aspects of the vigilance experience, the need to focus attention and the inability to quit the task at will, contribute to high levels of boredom. Because the vigilance task itself requires only an occasional response, the boredom forces the observer to seek additional stimulation. Thus, the observer directs attention inward to internally generated stimuli instead of outward to the task at hand. Consequently, stress arises from the need to combat feelings of boredom and to refocus attention on the detection task.