Question

Think of examples of when you feel you can successfully multitask and when you can’t. Discuss what aspects of the tasks or the situation seem to influence divided attention performance. How accurate do you think you are in judging your own multitasking ability?

Answer 1

In everyday life, people frequently divide their attention between two or more tasks, such as viewing a TV show while conversing with the person sitting next to us. Such an instance of multitasking requires us to process two distinct sets of information using parallel process of attention where we select both the stimuli from our environment and respond to them at the same time. However, such a division of attention across multiple tasks is not always easy or even possible.

According to the distractor-selection hypothesis (Mulligan, 2003), dividing attention during encoding reduces perceptual priming when we are presented with a stimulus which is distracting or demands greater attentional resources. In such cases, our information capacity gets simultaneously bombarded with excess of sensory input with the effect that performing both the tasks simultaneously becomes impossible or difficult. Thus, for instance, listening to loud music while solving complex mathematics problems tends to distract the focus from the computational task as the latter places a demand on higher cognitive processes such as problem solving, decision-making and accurately recalling the knowledge about mathematical operations. Pashler explained this limits of the multitasking function in humans in his Bottleneck theory of attention (1998). According to this view, the brain networks function like a bottleneck structure through which information gets funnelled downwards. That is, there is limit to how many processes that a specific brain region or network can concurrently perform. Thus, having alight conversation while watching television is easier compared to watching TV and chopping vegetables at the same time as the information in the latter instance require visual perception of informations.