Complex

Abstract

As vigilance research overwrites political morality with psychometrics, it establishes the state of vigilance as a space where the technical lexicon of control systems found in cybernetics and communication theory merge with the field of experimental psychology (Bakan 1952, 1955; Baker 1959; Broadbent 1952; Mackworth; Deutsch and Deutsch 1963). From the early to mid-1950s, terms like “noise,” “signal,” “decision,” “detection,” “information,” and “probability” gradually began to appear in vigilance research in a haphazard way to simply augment the limitations in established behaviorist paradigms without refuting the predominance of extinction theory (Deese 1951, 1955), expectancy theory (Holland 1956, 1957), inhibition theory, and motivation theory; but once attention becomes modeled as a limited-feedback circuit in 1958, vigilance rapidly follows suit and becomes retheorized as a control system. For example, as early as 1961, the symposium devoted to vigilance sponsored by the United States Office of Naval Research and attended by many founders of first-wave vigilance research, is a record of a pronounced debate and renegotiation of the definition, criteria, method, and theories of vigilance. In the published transcript of the proceedings, what was a mere ad hoc technical lexicon in the mid-1950s starts to rectify the entire area of research with the theories of communication and information, and models of control systems can now epistemologize the vigilance task along these lines (Buckner and McGrath 1963), but after this occurs what follows over the next decade and a half ultimately brings about the decline of the term.