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Extroversion, time of day, vigilance performance, and physiological arousal: Failure to replicate traditional findings

1972; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3758/bf03336547

2197-9952

Anthony Gale, Ray Bull, Valerie Penfold, Michael Colestt, Rosemary K. Barraclough,

Behavioral Health and Interventions

Three experiments are reported. Performance in the first may be used to predict performance in the second and third. The first examined the effect of extroversion, neuroticism, sex, and time of day on performance on a group-administered hour-long auditory vigilance task (N = 160; times of day: 0800, 1000, 1400, and 2000 h). Performance was related to none of these variables, but the task did yield a significant decrement in performance during the first 12 min (p s<.05), and level of performance was well within the range typically reported for such tasks. Good and poor vigilance performers were then compared on two further separate tasks: (1) tonic and phasic EDA during habituation to repeated auditory stimulation (N = 22), and (2) tonic occipital EEG during alternated eyes-open and eyes-closed trials (N = 16). Of the EDA measures, tonic EDA (basal resistance) discriminated between good and poor vigilance performers. The resistance level of the good group increased during habituation trials (p <.01) and was also higher than that of the poor group following the ninth of 20 trials (p <.05). The tonic EEG of the good group was higher in amplitude than that of the low group (p <.05). These results are contrary to predictions made on the basis of arousal interpretations of individual differences in vigilance performance, since both the EDA and EEG measures indicated that good vigilance performers are lower aroused than poor vigilance performers.