Neural signatures of vigilance decrements predict behavioural errors before they occur

There are many monitoring environments, such as railway control, in which lapses of attention can have tragic consequences. Problematically, sustained monitoring for rare targets is difficult, with more misses and longer reaction times over time. What changes in the brain underpin these “vigilance decrements”? We designed a multiple-object monitoring (MOM) paradigm to examine how the neural representation of information varied with target frequency and time performing the task. Behavioural performance decreased over time for the rare target (monitoring) condition, but not for a frequent target (active) condition. This was mirrored in the neural results: there was weaker coding of critical information during monitoring versus active conditions. We developed new analyses that can predict behavioural errors from the neural data more than a second before they occurred. This paves the way for pre-empting behavioural errors due to lapses in attention and provides new insight into the neural correlates of vigilance decrements.