Attentional strategies in Type-A individuals

The present study describes two experiments designed to evaluate the attentional strategies that Type-A subjects use depending on the kind of task they have to solve. The results indicate they embarked on two different strategies depending on the way in which the task was displayed: when two tasks were presented, one as important and the other as trivial, Type-A subjects focused their attention on the stimuli of the important task. However, if a single task is presented and it appears simultaneously with some other stimuli for which there are no instructions, thus generating an ambiguous situation, the attentional strategy that appears in Type-A subjects could be called hypervigilance (defined as sustained attention directed at all stimuli involved in a task). Anyway, both strategies are in consonance with the general aim of Type-A subjects to employ as much effort as possible in all the tasks they must solve.