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Vigilance

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Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology

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Definition

Vigilance (from Latin, vigil;awake) is conceptualized as a special case of the broader psychological construct of sustained attention. Sustained attention refers to the ability to consciously or semiconsciously focus on tasks over extended periods of time, whereas vigilance may be defined more narrowly as a person’s preparedness to detect infrequent and unpredictably occurring events or signals over prolonged periods of time. The ability to detect targets can be influenced by many factors such as the salience, frequency, duration, and stimulus characteristics of the target, the stimulus field in which the target is embedded and the similarity and frequency of nontargets to targets, the period of time over which vigilance must be maintained, speed of performance, and other factors. Typically, vigilance requires effortful maintenance of attention, or concentration, to detect infrequent and weak signals. Vigilance is required in many real-world applications such as radar and...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry & Human Behavior, Brown University/Providence VA Medical Center, Providence, RI, USA

    Stephen Correia

  2. Memory and Aging Program, Butler Hospital, Providence, RI, USA

    Christina Figueroa

  3. Clinical Cognitive Aging and Memory Program, University of Florida-Gainsville, 2004 Mowry Rd, Gainsville, FL, 32611, USA

    Ronald Cohen

Authors
  1. Stephen Correia
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  2. Christina Figueroa
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  3. Ronald Cohen
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Correspondence to Stephen Correia .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Richmond, Virgin Islands, USA

    Jeffrey Kreutzer

  2. Kessler Foundation , West Orange, New Jersey, USA

    John DeLuca

  3. Suite 200 , Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, USA

    Bruce Caplan

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Correia, S., Figueroa, C., Cohen, R. (2016). Vigilance. In: Kreutzer, J., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56782-2_1338-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56782-2_1338-2

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-56782-2

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