The HED Task Catalog is under development. IDs are not stable until formal release. Comments are welcome at github.com/hed-standard/hed-task/issues.

Psychomotor Vigilance Task

HED task ID: hedtsk_psychomotor_vigilance

Family: Oddball, vigilance and continuous performance tasks

Also known as: PVT, Psychomotor Vigilance

Simple reaction to visual or auditory stimuli appearing at random intervals over 5–10 minutes; mean RT, lapses, and false starts index sustained attention.

Description

The Psychomotor Vigilance Task is a sustained-attention reaction time task widely used in sleep research and fatigue monitoring. Participants monitor a display and respond as quickly as possible to a visual stimulus (typically a millisecond counter) that appears at random inter-stimulus intervals (2–10 seconds) over a 5–10 minute period. The primary measure is the number of lapses (responses >500 ms), reflecting momentary failures of sustained attention. The PVT is considered the gold-standard behavioral measure of vigilance and sleepiness because it is simple, has minimal learning effects, and is highly sensitive to sleep deprivation, circadian misalignment, and time-on-task.

Inclusion test

An experiment is an instance of this task when its procedure matches, it manipulates at least one of the listed variables, and it records at least one of the listed measures.

Procedure

A visual stimulus (counter or light) appears at random intervals (2–10 s); participants press a button as quickly as possible upon detection. The task runs for 10 minutes.

Manipulation

Test duration; inter-stimulus interval range; time of day; sleep deprivation condition.

Measurement

Mean RT; number of lapses (RT > 500 ms); fastest 10% RT; reciprocal RT transformation.

Variations

Named versions that change what the participant experiences or does. The identifier of a variation is hedvar_<task>__<variation>.

Variation

Description

Justification

Standard 10-Minute PVT

hedvar_psychomotor_vigilance__standard_10_minute_pvt

10 minutes with 2–10 second random ISI; gold-standard protocol.

Canonical 10-min RT task with variable ISI

Brief PVT (PVT-B)

hedvar_psychomotor_vigilance__brief_pvt_pvt_b

3-minute version; validated against standard for most outcome metrics.

3-min version; recognized published abbreviated instrument

Palm PVT / Mobile PVT

hedvar_psychomotor_vigilance__palm_pvt_mobile_pvt

Handheld or smartphone implementations for field use.

Handheld or mobile device; different motor and environmental context

Auditory PVT

hedvar_psychomotor_vigilance__auditory_pvt

Respond to auditory tones instead of visual stimuli.

Auditory tone instead of visual stimulus; different sensory modality

Cognitive processes

This task is designed to engage the following processes:

Key references

  • Dinges, D. F., & Powell, J. W. (1985). Microcomputer analyses of performance on a portable, simple visual RT task during sustained operations. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 17(6), 652–655. (DOI)

  • Basner, M., & Dinges, D. F. (2011). Maximizing sensitivity of the Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT) to sleep loss. Sleep, 34(5), 581–591. (DOI, PubMed)

Further references

  • Basner, M., Mollicone, D., & Dinges, D. F. (2011). Validity and sensitivity of a brief Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT-B) to total and partial sleep deprivation. Acta Astronautica, 69(11-12), 949–959. (DOI, PubMed)

  • Lim, J., & Dinges, D. F. (2010). A meta-analysis of the impact of short-term sleep deprivation on cognitive variables. Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 375–389. (DOI, PubMed)

  • Jewett, M. E., Dijk, D.-J., Kronauer, R. E., & Dinges, D. F. (1999). Dose-response relationship between sleep duration and human psychomotor vigilance and subjective alertness. Sleep, 22(2), 171–179. (DOI, PubMed)

  • Drummond, S. P. A., Bischoff-Grethe, A., Dinges, D. F., Ayalon, L., Mednick, S. C., & Meloy, M. J. (2005). The neural basis of the Psychomotor Vigilance Task. Sleep, 28(9), 1059–1068. (DOI, PubMed)