Expanding dual-task research by a triple-task

Expanding dual-task research by a triple-task

Blog Article

Multitasking research in the MasterSeries laboratory is dominated by extremely simplistic dual-task paradigms.Although dual-tasks allow for some variations, they do not compare well to more complex everyday task settings.This study expands a classical dual-task paradigm by adding a third task.The dual-tasks and the triple-task always consisted of the same three single tasks.

The aim was to investigate the effects of the combinations of the three single-tasks and in which manner response times and costs increased.Stimulus-response pairings were varied either once within participants (E1) or between participants (E2).Our results showed that the increase in response time from dual-tasks to triple-tasks was only 43% of the increase from single-tasks to dual-tasks suggesting a non-linear cost of adding tasks.Moreover, response times in each subtask were higher in triple-task situations compared to single-task or dual-task situations.

This is in contrast to classical dual-tasks, in which typically only one of the two responses is delayed.Cognitively, for costs in triple-tasks, unlike in dual-tasks, task coordination Metal Cover seems to play a larger role compared to the classically suggested relationships between stimulus and response in terms of their modality- and ideomotor-compatibility which we will discuss.Overall, the study demonstrates that current multitasking research is limited in its generalizability by focusing only on dual-tasks and would benefit from research with more complex task settings.