Lecture 7 Attention 3 Multitasking

Question 1

multitasking

Answer 1

conducting multiple tasks at the same time; conducting multiple tasks sequentially

Question 2

tasks share “general resources”

Answer 2

attentional limit in multitasking; the more resources a task draws, the more interference it causes on other tasks; a special case: response selector

evidence:

• primary task: auditory digit +1
• secondary task: search for “K” in a stream of visual letters
• interference is observed

Question 3

similar tasks share task-specific limitation

Answer 3

attentional limit in multitasking; similar tasks tend to interfere more

evidence:
- primary task: shadow words
- secondary task: memorize (words presented to the other ear, words presented visually, pictures presented visually)
- interference is reduced when the two tasks become more different

Question 4

practice and multitasking

Answer 4

practice reduces dual-task interference without eliminating it; practice does not eliminate the cost even with 10,000+ trials, and after 10+ hours of practice in simple tasks

Question 5

task switching

Answer 5

what is required to make sequential processing happen; is costly

patients with frontal lobe damage have difficulty switching tasks
-example: Duncan’s task –> patients with prefrontal damage perform poorly on this task (mean failure to pass: 2.5 out of 3 - control: 0.8 our fo 3)

Question 6

multiple demand system

Answer 6

a set of frontoparietal regions involved in attention, task control, fluid intelligence

Question 7

attention training

Answer 7

training enhances performance in the task that people are trained on, but transfer to other untrained tasks is inconsistent