Title Information
Title
Multitasking: task switching or task integration?
Name: Personal
Name Part
Ford, Celia
Role
Role Term: Text
creator
Name: Personal
Name Part
Bhandari, Apoorva
Role
Role Term: Text
creator
Name: Personal
Name Part
Badre, David
Role
Role Term: Text
advisor
affiliation
Brown University. Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences
Name: Corporate
Name Part
Brown University. Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award
Role
Role Term: Text
research program
Genre (aat)
posters
Origin Information
Place
Place Term: Text
Providence, RI
Publisher
Brown University
Date Created (keyDate="yes", encoding="w3cdtf")
2016
Physical Description
Extent
1 poster
digitalOrigin
reformatted digital
Abstract
Multitasking is often presented as "task-switching," in which component tasks must be handled efficiently and separately. However, recent theories about the "chunking" of overlapping neural operations led me to hypothesize that, when given the opportunity, humans integrate overlapping neural operations rather than rely on task-switching. My study takes advantage of previous observations that the brain transfers its organizational strategies, or "cognitive control policies," between tasks, leading to performance impairments when a policy is transferred to a task situation it no longer applies to. I am comparing two subject groups: one which learns two tasks individually, and one which learns them together. I then compare performance on a novel version of one of the component tasks. If subjects with multitask experience show impaired performance on this block, relative to controls, it would suggest that multitasking required the development of a new control policy which is inapplicable to either component task alone. A future manipulation will compare two multitasking groups, one with opportunity for integration across tasks and one without, hopefully revealing more information about the nature of the control policies used to accommodate multitask performance.
Subject (LCSH)
Topic
Human multitasking
Subject (MESH)
Topic
Metacognition
Subject (MESH)
Topic
Executive Function
Identifier: DOI
10.26300/4j1p-ek28
Type of Resource
text