Sustaining attention to simple tasks: A meta-analytic review of the neural mechanisms of vigilant attention.

Maintaining attention for more than a few seconds is essential for mastering everyday life. Yet, our ability to stay focused on a particular task is limited, resulting in well-known performance decrements with increasing time on task. Intriguingly, such decrements are even more likely if the task is cognitively simple and repetitive. The attentional function that enables our prolonged engagement in intellectually unchallenging, uninteresting activities has been termed vigilant attention. Here we synthesized what we have learned from functional neuroimaging about the mechanisms of this essential mental faculty. To this end, a quantitative meta-analysis of pertinent neuroimaging studies was performed, including…

• NI
  National Institute of Mental Health

  Award: 1R01MH074457-01A1