Psychomotor vigilance task

The Psychomotor Vigilance Task (hereafter ‘PVT’) is a chronometric measure of an individual’s readiness to detect and respond to certain specified small changes in a labile environment, conceptualised pragmatically within a visio-reactive framework. Quantitative dependent variables involve omission and commission errors, reflecting fluctuations in endogenous cognitive condition.

The PVT was championed by Prof Dinges and popularised by its ease of scoring, simple metrics, and convergent validity.