Mäntylä Timo, Coni Valentina, Kubik Veit, Todorov Ivo, Del Missier Fabio
Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.
Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy.
Cogn Process. 2017 Aug;18(3):229-235. doi: 10.1007/s10339-017-0799-4. Epub 2017 Mar 18.
Many everyday activities require coordination and monitoring of complex relations of future goals and deadlines. Cognitive offloading may provide an efficient strategy for reducing control demands by representing future goals and deadlines as a pattern of spatial relations. We tested the hypothesis that multiple-task monitoring involves time-to-space transformational processes, and that these spatial effects are selective with greater demands on coordinate (metric) than categorical (nonmetric) spatial relation processing. Participants completed a multitasking session in which they monitored four series of deadlines, running on different time scales, while making concurrent coordinate or categorical spatial judgments. We expected and found that multitasking taxes concurrent coordinate, but not categorical, spatial processing. Furthermore, males showed a better multitasking performance than females. These findings provide novel experimental evidence for the hypothesis that efficient multitasking involves metric relational processing.
许多日常活动都需要对未来目标和期限的复杂关系进行协调与监控。认知卸载可能提供一种有效的策略，通过将未来目标和期限表示为空间关系模式来降低控制需求。我们测试了这样一个假设：多任务监控涉及时间到空间的转换过程，并且这些空间效应具有选择性，对坐标（度量）空间关系处理的要求高于类别（非度量）空间关系处理。参与者完成了一个多任务环节，在这个环节中，他们监控四个在不同时间尺度上运行的期限系列，同时进行并发的坐标或类别空间判断。我们预期并发现，多任务会对并发的坐标空间处理造成负担，但不会对类别空间处理造成负担。此外，男性的多任务表现优于女性。这些发现为有效多任务涉及度量关系处理这一假设提供了新的实验证据。
