Skillnaden i effektivitet vid dual-tasking mellan visuella och auditiva uppgifter

Sammanfattning: People are more connected to every aspect of the world than ever before, and in our struggle to keep up-to-date resort to multi-tasking. The problem is that people cannot focus effectively on several kinds of stimuli at once. To expand further current understanding of attention capacity, an experiment was conducted to investigate costs in effectivity during dual-tasking. This was examined by merging the classic Posner cue test with a distracting visual or auditory task. Twenty-four participants either read or listened to a text while simultaneously completing the Posner task to assess endogenous and exogenous attention. The result show better performance when the distraction text was presented auditory than visual, when the left target location was cued as opposed to the right target location, and when the cue was valid than invalid. We conclude that attention capacity is reduced more when people try to perform two task using the same, unimodal as compared to different, crossmodal cognitive processes, but nonetheless the cues operated effectively regardless of whether the distracting task was auditory or visual.