Monitoring Performance Across Sense Modes: An Individual Differences Approach

A number of previous investigations have reported relatively low correlations between performance measures across different sense modalities. It has been suggested that such low intertask correlations may have resulted from a failure to control for task difficulty. Attempts to control for task difficulty on a group basis have been unsuccessful as evidenced by the varied and often contradictory findings. The present investigation attempted to equate task difficulty across sense modes on an individual basis. The critical dimension for the detection task used in this investigation was stimulus duration. For each subject, stimulus durations were obtained for both visual and auditory presentation which resulted in similar detection rates and were then used as signals in a later monitoring task. All subjects performed the monitoring task under three conditions: (1) visual presentation only, (2) auditory presentation only, and (3) simultaneous auditory-visual presentation. Measures included correct detections, false alarms, d', and β. All measures were found to be highly correlated across the three task conditions. The findings of this investigation provide support to the notion of a common “vigilance factor.”