Department of Psychology, Medical School Hamburg, Am Kaiserkai 1, 20457, Hamburg, Germany.
ICAN Institute for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Medical School Hamburg, Am Kaiserkai 1, 20457, Hamburg, Germany.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2024 Oct;31(5):2189-2204. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02476-6. Epub 2024 Feb 26.
When the performance of two tasks overlaps in time, performance impairments in one or both tasks are common. Various theoretical explanations for how component tasks are controlled in dual-task situations have been advanced. However, less attention has been paid to the issue of how two temporally overlapping tasks are appropriately coordinated in terms of their order. The current study focuses on two specific aspects of this task-order coordination: (1) the potential effects of practice on task-order coordination performance and (2) its relationships with cognitive meta-control mechanisms that adjust this coordination. These aspects were investigated in a visual-auditory dual-task combination with randomly changing task orders across trials after four sessions of dual-task practice (N = 24) and single-task practice (N = 24). The results demonstrated that task-order coordination improves during dual-task practice, and in contrast to the effects of single-task practice. Practice, on the other hand, did not show substantial evidence of an effect on the adjustment of task-order coordination. This practice-related dissociation is consistent with the assumption that (1) task-order coordination and (2) its sequential adjustment are separable sets of processes.
当两个任务在时间上重叠时，一个或两个任务的表现都会受到影响。针对双任务情境下如何控制组件任务，已经提出了各种理论解释。然而，对于两个时间上重叠的任务如何在顺序上进行适当的协调，关注较少。本研究主要关注任务顺序协调的两个特定方面：（1）练习对任务顺序协调表现的潜在影响，以及（2）其与调整这种协调的认知元控制机制的关系。这两个方面在视觉-听觉双任务组合中进行了研究，该组合在四个双任务练习（N=24）和单任务练习（N=24）的试验中，任务顺序随机变化。结果表明，在双任务练习期间，任务顺序协调会提高，与单任务练习的效果相反。另一方面，练习并没有显示出对任务顺序协调调整的实质性影响。这种与练习相关的分离与以下假设一致：（1）任务顺序协调和（2）其顺序调整是可分离的过程集。
