Malleable Attentional Resources Theory (MART) purports that atten-tional resources degrade in underload conditions, such that an operator is less able to cope when demands increase (e.g., in an automation failure scenario). Thus far, there has been considerable empirical and theoretical support for MART, and it has the potential to define an underload threshold for a given scenario. However, in order to realise this potential, it is first necessary to determine the decay and recovery curves for attentional resources. This paper represents the next step for MART, as data are reported that plot the time-decay curve for the attentional resources of participants in a vehicle automation experiment. We reveal that underloaded participants experience significant resource decay with the first minute of the task. The findings are discussed with respect to the elusive "redline" for mental underload.
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