Individual difference and SSAT performance

Pages: 1541-1543
Anurag Upadhaya (Government Inter College, Uttar Pradesh)
Richa Singh (Department of Psychology, Vasanta Collage for Women Varanasi, U.P.)

The topic of vigilance behavior in today’s work setting such as air traffics control (ATC), industrial quality control, sonar and radar operations etc. is gaining much importance among cognitive neuroscientists, academicians, researches as well as psychologists. Like other cognitive capacities, the capacity to sustain attention i.e. vigilance, has been considered to represent a limited resource. This is regarded as the most important determinant of the vigilance decrement. The majority of investigators report large individual differences in susceptibility to decrement. Thus, personality has been found to affect vigilance performance across time periods, besides other individual difference factors. Extraversion and introversion is the central dimension of human personality which differs from each other in terms of cortical arousal level. Researches demonstrated that introverts, who had high level of arousal, showed less decrement function than extraverts, having low activation. But in several experimental studies hypothesized of greater decrement for extraverts was not supported. Moreover, the pattern of vigilance decrement changed with the time of day. Thus, as the technical development is growing rapidly, it has become increasingly necessary to examine how vigil function changes with personality type and task demand and to understand the extent to which these changes can affect their functioning. The researches on the personality aspect, until recently, have been limited in scope while it plays important role in predicting decline reactions during vigil. The present study examined the relationship of personality and sustained task performance. The experiment was conducted on 30 students of Banaras Hindu University (M±SD=22.35year±2.55). Participants were classified as introverts (N = 15) and extraverts (N = 15) based on their EPQ-R score. Performances in terms of correct and incorrect detection were collected. The experimental task comprised of two squares one of 3.5 cm. (target) and another of 3.3 cm (non-target). The task continued for 40 min. Target and non-target ratio was 1:4. The target probability was 20 percent. Participants were required to detect infrequently occurring critical signals. The task was designed on Super Lab (Cedrus, 2007 Version 4.0) and displayed on a 15” SVGA colour monitor of a Pentium IV computer. The overall mean correct detection performance (hits) indicated that introvert participants detected more targets (signals) (M = 88.74%, SD = 14.25%) than extravert participants (M = 75.48%, SD = 19.92%) on vigilance task. Results of personality components revealed that introverts were significantly related to performance efficiency during the task compare to extraverts. Present finding explains the importance of the individual difference factor in reducing the variability in performance which protects declination in vigil. Further the results support an arousal theory perspective in regards to the vigilance decrement.