PhD Student

Although monotony is widely recognised as being detrimental to performance its occurence and effects are not yet well understood. This is aggravated by confusion in the research literature with other states of low arousal such as boredom, fatigue, hypovigilance and underload. The overall aim of my research is to explore and understand the link between monotony and the development of task-related fatigue. This has implications for many industries including rail, aviation, nuclear, military and road transport, due to the nature of the tasks that many of these workers are required to do and to do so reliably and safely. The increasing use of automation in these industries also means that the role of the active worker is being changed to that of a passive monitor which may not actually relieve workload as expected and could potentially increase the monotony of a task to a point where performance starts to suffer. Possible ways to mitigate monotony will also be explored. Overall, this knowledge will contribute to an increased understanding of factors related to performance and consequently to safety, reliability and efficiency in many industries.