Visual and auditory simple reaction times were measured in Sri Lankan young adults to see the effect of dual-tasking on reaction time. Reaction times were measured using a reaction time program in a computer. Subjects responded to stimuli by pressing the spacebar with their dominant index finger. Visual and auditory simple reaction times (ms) in males (mean ± SD) were 293.5 ± 42.4, 302.2 ± 41.9...

In this paper we describe an empirical study of human-human multi-tasking dialogues (MTD), where people perform multiple verbal tasks overlapped in time. We examined how conversants switch from the ongoing task to a real-time task. We found that 1) conversants use discourse markers and prosodic cues to signal task switching, similar to how they signal topic shifts in single-tasking speech; 2) c...

Multi-tasking can increase susceptibility to distraction, affecting whether irrelevant objects capture attention. Similarly, people with depression often struggle to concentrate when performing cognitively demanding tasks. This parallel suggests that depression is like multi-tasking. To test this idea, we examined relations between self-reported levels of anhedonic depression (a dimension that ...

Several studies have shown that people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) demonstrate difficulties in doing two things at once or 'dual-tasking' and that this dual task impairment is insensitive to normal ageing, chronic depression or prodromal conditions like Mild Cognitive Impairment. It is not known, however, if this impairment is specific to AD, or also present in other dementias, such as vascul...

Background: There seems to be a common belief that women are better in multi-tasking than men, but there is practically no scientific research on this topic. Here, we tested whether women have better multi-tasking skills than men. Methods: In Experiment 1, we compared performance of 120 women and 120 men in a computer-based task-switching paradigm. In Experiment 2, we compared a different group...

Remote tusking encompasses different functionality, such as remote forking, multiple remote spawning, and task migration. In order to overcome the relatively high costs of these mechunisms, optimizations can be upplied at various levels of the underlying operating system or application. Optimizations include concurrent message transmission, increased throughput and reduced latency at the distri...

The nature of today’s healthcare practice makes interruptions, distractions and multi-tasking commonplace, even during complex and high risk tasks.[1,2,3] Interruptions are often cited as a problem in medication safety, particularly in relation to nurses administering medication.[1,4] Previous studies [5,6] suggest an association between interruptions and medication administration errors. While...