• Sleep Medicine and Psychophysiology
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.26-31
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• 1999

"Attention" is not defined sufficiently. This term incorporates several dimensions or complex information processes such as alertness, spatial distribution, focused attention, sustained attention, divided attention and supervisory attentional control. In practice, however, various aspects of attention cannot be assessed separately with a single test. Moreover, a particular test is never assessing attention only, because the several intervening variables may influence the attentional component. Therefore, one can only assess a certain aspect of human behavior with special interest for its attentional component. This paper attempted to clarify various concepts of attention, reviewed signal detection theories with receiver operating characteristic(ROC) curves, and listed practical methods for assessment of attention.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.29-40
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• 2023

Anxiety is known to upset the balance of the attentional system and prioritize the stimulus-driven system over the goal-directed system; however, self-instruction induces goal-directed behavior with the self-regulation effect. This study verified the effects of meteorological and self-instruction conditions on pilot anxiety and flight task performance for in-service pilots in a virtual reality environment. The meteorological conditions were divided into visual meteorological and very low visibility conditions, and the flight tasks were conducted by varying whether or not self-instruction was performed. The experiment results reveal that anxiety and heart rate were higher, and the performance of the flight task was lower in the very low visibility condition. However, anxiety and heart rate were lower, and the performance of the flight task was higher in the self-instruction condition. This result suggests that accidents due to difficulty in flight may increase because of anxiety, but such accidents may decrease because of flight performance improvement by self-instruction.