To assist students understand the difficult concepts of divided attention and interference, a new purpose built computer & mouse task is compared with an existing paper & pencil version, and yields complementary results. The pencil & paper task provides first-hand experience of divided attention and interference for the students. The computer & mouse task further extends the learning experience...

Although in many studies divided attention has been examined by having people perform the same task (e.g., report or search) with a large number of objects, in few studies have people had to perform two logically independent tasks involving the same brief display. In two experiments, subjects saw 200-msec arrays of characters. In dual-task blocks, theyclassified the color of some or all of the ...

When humans experience externally induced errors in a movement, the motor system's feedback control compensates for those errors within the movement. The motor system's predictive control then uses information about those errors to inform future movements. The role of attention in these two distinct motor processes is unclear. Previous experiments have revealed a role for attention in motor lea...

The current study examined whether video game training would help improve divided attention skills among older adults. Twenty-nine (4 males, 25 females) participants aged 50 to 84 years (M = 70) were tested for their skills of divided attention using a memory and reaction time task. Participants were randomly allocated to the experimental group and control group and only those in the experiment...

Divided attention is investigated in concurrent tasks of letter recognition and second-order motion detection. I developed a quantitative method, Structure-Attention Mapping (SAM), to explain my data and to relate concurrent psychophysical experiments to the architecture of human visual cortex. A dual task paradigm, in which the interference between two tasks indicated the nature of processing ...

background and aim: aging is accompanied with changes in cognitive capacities. in spite of advances in neural imaging technologies, there is not a straightforward method to observe cognitive functions. for assessing brain functions, researchers mainly use psychometric tests. the aim of this study was using consonant-vowel (cv) dichotic test as a non-invasive behavioral test for auditory attenti...

Distractions and multitasking are generally detrimental to learning and memory. Nevertheless, people often study while listening to music, sitting in noisy coffee shops, or intermittently checking their e-mail. The current experiments examined how distractions and divided attention influence one's ability to selectively remember valuable information. Participants studied lists of words that ran...

Under what search conditions does attention affect perceptual processes, resulting in capacity limitations, rather than affecting noisy decision-making processes? Does parallel or serial processing cause the capacity limitations? To address these issues, we varied stimulus complexity, set size, and whether distractors were mirror images of the target. Both target detection and localization prod...

How can we improve memory retention? A large body of research has suggested that difficulty encountered during learning, such as when practice sessions are distributed rather than massed, can enhance later memory performance (see R. A. Bjork & E. L. Bjork, 1992). Here, we investigated whether divided attention during retrieval practice can also constitute a desirable difficulty. Following two i...