Dual-task Interference: Bottleneck Constraint or Capacity Sharing? Evidence from Automatic and Controlled Processes

Overview

Journal Atten Percept Psychophys

Publisher Springer

Specialties Psychiatry
Psychology

Date 2024 Feb 28

PMID 38418805

Authors

Yanwen Wu

Qiangqiang Wang

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

This study investigated whether the interference between two tasks in dual-task processing stems from bottleneck limitations or insufficient cognitive resources due to resource sharing. Experiment 1 used tone discrimination as Task 1 and word or pseudoword classification as Task 2 to evaluate the effect of automatic versus controlled processing on dual-task interference under different SOA conditions. Experiment 2 reversed the task order. The results showed that dual-task interference persisted regardless of task type or order. Neither experiment found evidence that automatic tasks could eliminate interference. This suggests that resource limitations, rather than bottlenecks, may better explain dual-task costs. Specifically, when tasks compete for limited resources, the processing efficiency of both tasks is significantly reduced. Future research should explore how cognitive resources are dynamically allocated between tasks to better account for dual-task interference effects.

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