ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2020
How is multi-tasking different from increased difficulty?
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Too much, too little, or just right? The inverted-U relationship between human-AI collaboration modes and eudaimonic well-being.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- German version of subjective methods for measuring activation, mental workload, and attention in control rooms.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- An examination of sustained attention during complex multitasking scenarios.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Aligning visual imagery to the operator improves geospatial situation awareness in a single-display 360-degree periscope concept.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Mutual interplay between cognitive offloading and secondary task performance.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- The Association between Working Hours with Vigilance and Executive Function of Intensive Care Unit Nurses.Journal of nursing management · 2023Article
- Strategies to improve the implementation of intensive lifestyle interventions for obesity.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- The impact of cognitive load on prospective and retrospective time estimates at long durations: An investigation using a visual and memory search paradigm.Memory & cognition · 2022Article
- Behavioural and neural indices of perceptual decision-making in autistic children during visual motion tasks.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Visual Motion and Decision-Making in Dyslexia: Reduced Accumulation of Sensory Evidence and Related Neural Dynamics.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- EEG hybrid brain-computer interfaces: A scoping review applying an existing hybrid-BCI taxonomy and considerations for pediatric applications.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Using Past and Present Indicators of Human Workload to Explain Variance in Human Performance.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2021Article
- Transforming a Concept in a Tool: Diagnostic and Prognostic Value of Tasks Depleting Cognitive Resources.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
With the advancement of technologies like in-car navigation and smartphones, concerns around how cognitive functioning is influenced by "workload" are increasingly prevalent. Research shows that spreading effort across multiple tasks can impair cognitive abilities through an overuse of resources, and that similar overload effects arise in difficult single-task paradigms. We developed a novel lab-based extension of the Detection Response Task, which measures workload, and paired it with a Multiple Object Tracking Task to manipulate cognitive load. Load was manipulated either by changing within-task difficulty or by the addition of an extra task. Using quantitative cognitive modelling we showed that these manipulations cause similar cognitive impairments through diminished processing rates, but that the introduction of a second task tends to invoke more cautious response strategies that do not occur when only difficulty changes. We conclude that more prudence should be exercised when directly comparing multi-tasking and difficulty-based workload impairments, particularly when relying on measures of central tendency.
Indexed as
Identifiers
32440999What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.