The Effects of Values and Costs on the Detection and Identification of Signals in Auditory Vigilance1

The effects on performance of the value of detecting a signal, the cost of a miss or false detection, and the size of the set from which the signals were drawn were studied in an auditory vigilance task. Seventy-two subjects were randomly assigned to each cell of a factorial arrangement of the cost and load variables and required to detect and identify each of several 49 db SPL pure tones differing only in frequency. Analyses of the number of correct detections, correct identifications, false detections and detection response time indicated a significant performance decrement with time for all measures and suggested that increasing costs for misses and false detections led to poorer detection performance while value had no effect. Load effected only identification performance, as higher loads led to a decrease in the percentage of signals correctly identified. The ď and β statistics of signal detection theory, indicated sensitivity to be invariant with manipulations of costs and with time. These findings imply that the performance decrement during a vigil is due to an increased strictness in the criterion the subject sets for deciding whether or not a signal was present. The cost factors were effective in manipulating performance by causing changes in the subjects' decision criteria.