Reference
Norman Mackworth
The clock test and the first measurement of the decline in detection over a long watch are his.
Mackworth was commissioned during the Second World War to study why British Air Force radar operators missed detections. His answer was an experimental stand-in for the job: a clock whose pointer moved in small steps and occasionally made a double jump, watched for about two hours at a stretch. His 1948 paper reported a steep fall in detection in the first 30 minutes and a gentler one afterwards, which is the finding now called the vigilance decrement.
It is worth being clear about what he did not establish. His timing belongs to that task, and later work found the decline can start far sooner under other conditions. Nor did his results settle why it happens, which researchers still dispute. He later headed the Unit for Research in Applied Psychology at Cambridge.
Referenced work
- The breakdown of vigilance during prolonged visual search (1948, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1, 6-21) reference
Elsewhere
Listed here because we name Norman Mackworth in our writing. We are not affiliated with them and this page is our summary, not theirs.