Vigilance
Spot the double jump
EUROCONTROL's "stay alert" exercise. A circle drifts across a grid in jumps, one every two seconds — two cells along and one across each time, a shallow diagonal. Occasionally it makes a double jump, covering exactly twice that distance. Press the button every time you see one, and only then. Long, quiet and monotonous on purpose: it measures whether you are still watching after three minutes of nothing much happening.
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What to expect
- A circle stepping across a dotted grid every two seconds.
- Single jumps of two cells along and one across; doubles cover twice that.
- Roughly one jump in eight is a double.
- A button (or the spacebar) to call each double as it happens.
What it measures
- Sustained attention
- Noticing a rare event
- Resisting false alarms
Instructions
- 1Watch the size of the gap the circle leaves behind — a double jump is twice the distance of an ordinary one, in the same direction.
- 2Call it before the next jump lands; once it does, that one has gone.
- 3Do not press when you are unsure. A wrong call costs exactly what a missed double costs.
- 4Expect long quiet stretches. Losing concentration during them is the thing being tested.
Tips
- Keep your eyes on one spot rather than tracking the circle around the grid — distance is far easier to judge from a fixed point.
- Your score is catches out of doubles plus false calls, so hammering the button scores nothing.
Vigilance
A display where something changes at long, irregular intervals. You watch for a specific event — a double jump rather than a single one — and respond only to that.
Vigilance is the ability EUROCONTROL names that candidates find hardest to train, because the difficulty is boredom rather than complexity. Performance on this kind of task falls measurably after a few minutes for almost everyone; the point of practising is to find out where your own decline starts, so you know what to guard against on a six-hour day.
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