Cognitive Modeling 7 EPIC 8 ACT - R 11 Theories of Multitasking 14

Humans routinely perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Understanding the capabilities and limits of human multitasking not only helps design efficient devices to enhance human performance, but also helps uncover the nature of human cognition. Research on multitasking is difficult because multitasking performance is inevitably influenced by many factors such as a person’s perceptual, cognitive and motor capabilities, as well as the strategies adopted for managing the conflicts among tasks. Decades of experimental-psychology research has identified many of the invariable factors that influence multitasking, but it is cognitive modeling that shows the potential in integrating the factors and making quantitative predictions about the performance. This paper reviews the results of past research on multitasking performance, and stresses the increasingly important role that cognitive modeling has played in this research endeavor. The paper discusses multiple resource theory in detail, which is the current predominant theoretical framework in psychology that incorporates