Effects Of Personality Characteristics On Cognitive Vigilance

With the popularity of computers, cognitive vigilance tasks, which are different from sensory vigilance ones, have become more and more important monitoring tasks. Since vigilance performance is critical to some special settings in reality, for example, in nuclear power plants, it is important to select appropriate operators for vigilance tasks, especially for cognitive vigilance tasks, according to predictive index with the high validity and reliability. Researchers have made a lot of experiments in order to test many predictive index (ability, intelligence, sex, field dependence, and so on). But as a matter of fact, their efforts seem not to be successful. There is only one exception, extraversion. Many researches have confirmed this conclusion.While previous researches almost used sensory vigilance tasks, we used cognitive vigilance to investigate the effects of personality characteristics on vigilance performance and stress. Before experiments, we used Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) to select suitable subjects. This paper consists of two experiments, one deal with the effects of extraversion on vigilance performance and stress, and the other examined the effects of neuroticism. Two tasks were involved in each experiment. Event rate is 40/min in one task, and event rate is 10/min in the other. Signal rate is 10/10min in both tasks. There are two different kinds of index for measuring task performance (hit rate and missing rate) and stress level (subjective fatigue and numbers of muscle activity during whole task).The results suggest: (1)Vigilance performance decreases with time on tasks, and vigilance decrement appears in first30 mins. Response time increases during the period of work. (2)Personality characteristics have significant effects on stress. While neuroticism has no effecton vigilance, the influence of extraversion on stress is significant. In terms of subjectivereports of fatigue, there is a more significant difference between introverts and extraverts instress responses. (3)The event rate is one of major factors affecting task performace, and there is a significantinteraction between the event rate and extraversion. Introverts are suprior to extraverts. (4)The stress is related to the event rate in cognitive vigilance tasks. With the rise in the eventrate, there is a significant increase in subjects' stress levels.