Bourke Patrick A, Duncan John
Department of Psychology, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool, Lincoln LN6 7TS, United Kingdom.
Psychol Sci. 2005 Mar;16(3):208-13. doi: 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.00805.x.
Even dissimilar tasks interfere with one another when done together. We used visual search to examine the underlying cause of such interference. In many models, visual search is a process of biased competition controlled by a template describing the target to be sought. When the display is processed, matching against this template guides attention to the target. We show that increasing template complexity increased interference with a dissimilar concurrent task, story memory. This result was independent of reaction time: Increases in template complexity were associated with no increase in search time in Experiment 1 and with a decrease in search time in Experiment 2. The results show that the dual-task demands of visual search reflect the complexity of the template used in task control, and that this factor can be isolated from other sources of difficulty.
即使是不相似的任务，在同时进行时也会相互干扰。我们使用视觉搜索来探究这种干扰的潜在原因。在许多模型中，视觉搜索是一个由描述待寻找目标的模板控制的偏向竞争过程。当处理显示内容时，与该模板的匹配会将注意力引向目标。我们发现，增加模板复杂度会增加对不相似的并发任务——故事记忆的干扰。这一结果与反应时间无关：在实验1中，模板复杂度的增加与搜索时间的增加无关，而在实验2中与搜索时间的减少有关。结果表明，视觉搜索的双重任务需求反映了任务控制中使用的模板的复杂度，并且这个因素可以与其他困难来源区分开来。
