Szameitat André J
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN), Division of Psychology, Department of Life Sciences, College of Health and Life Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2022 May 11;13:778966. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.778966. eCollection 2022.
Human multitasking suffers from a central attentional bottleneck preventing parallel performance of central mental operations, leading to profound deferments in task performance. While previous research assumed that the deferment is caused by a mere waiting time (refractory period), we show that the bottleneck requires executive functions (EF; active scheduling account) accounting for a profound part of the deferment. Three participant groups with EF impairments (dyslexics, highly neurotics, deprived smokers) showed worse multitasking performance than respective control groups. Three further groups with EF improvements (video-gamers, bilinguals, coffee consumers) showed improved multitasking. Finally, three groups performed a dual-task and different measures of EF (reading span, rotation span, symmetry span) and showed significant correlations between multitasking performance and working memory capacity. Demands on EF during multitasking may cause more errors, mental fatigue and stress, with parts of the population being considerably more prone to this.
人类的多任务处理存在一个核心注意力瓶颈，它阻碍了中枢心理操作的并行执行，导致任务执行出现严重延迟。虽然先前的研究认为这种延迟仅仅是由等待时间（不应期）造成的，但我们发现，这个瓶颈需要执行功能（EF；主动调度理论）来解释延迟的很大一部分原因。三组存在执行功能障碍的参与者（诵读困难者、高神经质者、戒烟者）在多任务处理表现上比各自的对照组更差。另外三组执行功能得到改善的参与者（电子游戏玩家、双语者、咖啡饮用者）在多任务处理方面表现更佳。最后，三组参与者执行了一项双重任务以及不同的执行功能测量（阅读广度、旋转广度、对称广度），结果显示多任务处理表现与工作记忆容量之间存在显著相关性。多任务处理期间对执行功能的需求可能会导致更多错误、精神疲劳和压力，部分人群更容易受到影响。
