Attention, Workload, Vigilance, and Human Performance

When someone says “I looked but did not see it,” the questions are whether people in that position reliably miss what was missed, and whether the task or the design made the miss likely. Dr. Sawyer answers them from the science of attention, workload, and vigilance, including his Human Factors Prize-winning research on why people miss rare threats.

The cases include drivers who did not see a pedestrian, motorcycle, or stopped vehicle, workplace injuries that followed a lapse of attention, operators supervising automation, and monitoring work where a rare signal was missed among routine ones. The questions are perception and reaction time, mental workload, multitasking, situation awareness, inattentional blindness, and the decline in vigilance over a long watch.

His vigilance research began with the Air Force’s 711th Human Performance Wing, working with Joel Warm, and includes published work on vigilance in cyber defense and on the stress and workload of network analysts. He has published in Human Factors on how workload and performance carry over when task demands shift, studied situation awareness in vehicles, and used eye movements to measure visual attention. His dissertation, which won UCF’s College of Sciences Outstanding Dissertation Award, tested how the rarity of signals shapes distraction in driving, cyberattack, and battlefield simulations, and he was co-principal investigator on NASA-funded workload research. The methods are eye tracking, driving simulation, on-road studies, and signal detection analysis.