Abstract
This paper presents methods for improving the attention span of workers in tasks that heavily rely
on their attention to the occurrence of rare events.
The underlying idea in our approach is to dynamically augment the task with some dummy (artifi-
cial) events at different times throughout the task,
rewarding the worker upon identifying and reporting them. The proposed approach is an alternative
to the traditional approach of exclusively relying on
rewarding the worker for successfully identifying
the event of interest itself. We propose three methods for timing the dummy events throughout the
task. Two of these methods are static and determine
the timing of the dummy events at random or uniformly throughout the task. The third method is dynamic and uses the identification (or misidentification) of dummy events as a signal for the worker’s
attention to the task, adjusting the rate of dummy
events generation accordingly