Task Switching Essay

In the excerpt from Richard Restak, he talked about how the plasticity of our brain is changing the way we do things toay. The human brain is changing everyday and there is no way anyone can stop it. Richard Restak, an expert on the brain, talks about how the plasticity of our brains is changing constantly. He believes that this change is negatively hindering our ability to focus and produce a single task. The rewiring of our brains is forcing us as humans to make many changes to our everyday lives, and the main change it is causing us is that in order to function we need to multitask. Multitasking is the new thing today; everyone wants to be able to do as many things as

Multitasking, helpful or harmful? In Alina Tugend’s “Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus”, Tugend explores multitasking in several ways. Explaining how we as humans sacrifice focus “shifting focus from task to task gives illusion that we’re simultaneously tasking”. Also, how our brains react to operating and trying to do more than one task at once. Only one or two visual stimulants can activate our neurons at one particular time. Lastly, how we can recreate boundaries and cope with everyday life and multitasking. Tugend reiterates several times the importance of one task at a time so we as humans can effectively complete tasks to the best of our abilities instead of giving partial focus and not efficiently completely a task. Multitasking is very beneficial at times, but more often there are significant downfalls; it is crucial we learn how to manage the downfalls of juggling tasks, events, conversations, and daily events.

In “Multitasking Can Make You Lose...Um...Focus,” Alina Tugend examines the negative aspects and many disadvantages that occur through multitasking. Tugend begins by stating that multitasking is the norm for today’s fast paced society; however, in reality it is pulling focus from the task at hand. The author continues on to cite various researchers who express that the brain cannot simultaneously do two tasks at once and is actually just flipping back and forth between tasks rapidly. Although multitasking seems like a time efficient method, Tugend reveals, it is actually creating a large amount of stress and pressure on the individual. Furthermore, the author notes that multitasking actually pulls away from the task at hand creating a great time loss. Tugend even goes on to explain that multitasking is proving to be bad for innovation by not allowing an individual to think in depth about one task for an extended period of time. With Tugends article in mind I agree that multitasking puts a lot of stress and pressure on the individual, creates a loss in time, and is awful for innovation.

Ullsperger, Bylsma, and Botvinick (2005) investigated whether the findings of Mayr, Awh, and Laurey (2003) can be replicated and how much they can be shown across different task performances. Their specific study was motivated by a prior experiment where Gratton, Coles, and Donchin (1992) found that after an incompatible type trial reaction times were reduced and target processing occurred more frequently than flanker processing on the next trial. Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, and Cohen (2001) believed that this follows the conflict monitoring hypothesis where incompatible trials involve a conflict with the response leading to greater top-down information processing (Botvinick, Nystrom, Fissell, Carter, & Cohen, 1999). However, Mayr et. al (2003) argued that the congruency sequence effect found by Gratton et al. (1992) was due to repetition priming because of stimulus repeats in a flanker task. This may have led to a faster reaction time with repeated trials. Mayr et al. (2003) used two experiments to present evidence for their argument. Both experiments failed to show the effect found by Gratton et al. (1992) when target and stimulus items did not repeat from trial to trial.

It requires participates doing a perceptual judgement task and visuomotor adaptation task (Abbott 2013). Adam Gazzaley states "Players are required to steer a car on an unsteady road with their left thumb while keeping an eye out for signs that randomly pop up." The signs are a particular shape and colour the players have to shoot it down using a finger on their right hand (Abbott 2013). Gazzaley also states that the multitasking exercise draws a mixture of cognitive skills just as real life does, for an example attention focusing, task switching and memory (Abbott 2013). Gazzaley and his colleagues decided to perform an experiment involving thirty volunteers who were born in between the twenties to the seventies. They recruited forty-six new volunteers aged between sixty and eighty-five, Gazzaley and his colleagues put the volunteers through a four-week training period with a version of NeuroRacer that increased in difficulty as the players improved (Abbott 2013). Four weeks have passed and the volunteers have increased and improved heaps, they have achieved higher scored than inexperienced and untrained twenty-year-olds. According to Abbott (2013), Gazzaley has stated that multitasking may put pressure and stress on the cognitive control system, raising the level of all of its

“Response selection bottleneck” psychologist Rene Marois of Vanderbilt University found evidence, of when the brain is forced to respond to several stimuli at once. () This’s one form of a term we are all familiar with; like when the cars on the freeway can no longer just drive straight to their destination, but now do to many vehicles all approaching the same area at once, have formed what we would call a bottleneck. In the multitasking world to many thoughts, and the way to handle those thoughts, have met with a block. As a result, task-switching leads to time lost as the brain determines which task to perform.() This of course would be a con and represent why we would want to

The cognitive-motor task paradigm is based on theories related to attentional resources. Attentional resources are defined as information processing resources that are required to complete a task 19. The limited capacity theory states that one central attentional resource exists 43. When two tasks are performed simultaneously, the central system must divide the total capacity between the tasks at hand. The performance of the secondary task can provide an indication of the total processing capacity and the attentional demands for the primary task. If the primary task does not require a large portion of the total processing capacity, performance of the secondary task will not be altered. If however, the primary task is more demanding for processing capacity, the performance of the secondary task will decrease as the total capacity is reached 43. In this theory, the two tasks compete for the same pool of limited resources. However, multiple resources theory states that there are several attentional resources, each with limited capacity, and the amount of specific resources required for performing certain tasks depends on the tasks characteristics. Under the assumption of multiple resource pools, the execution of two concurrent tasks only suffers if some of the resources required to perform one of the tasks are also necessary to perform the other task. Thus, when two tasks are performed simultaneously, the competition for available

Task switching is the cognitive ability to switch between one task to the next. Research shows that when a person switches from one task to another, there will be a higher incidence of errors coupled with slower reaction time (switch cost) as opposed to trials where a person is doing the same task over and over (repeat trial). The switch cost is attributed to task-set reconfiguration because of the time it takes to reconfigure task-sets. In this task switch experiment we measured reaction times and error rates on both repeat trials and switch trials (task switches). Twenty-one participants from

The cognitive-motor task paradigm is based on theories related to attentional resources. Attentional resources are defined as information processing resources that are required to complete a task 19. The limited capacity theory states that one central attentional resource exists 42. When two tasks are performed simultaneously, the central system must divide the total capacity between the tasks at hand. The performance of the secondary task can provide an indication of the total processing capacity and the attentional demands for the primary task. If the primary task does not require a large portion of the total processing capacity, performance of the secondary task will not be altered. If however, the primary task is more demanding for processing capacity, the performance of the secondary task will decrease as the total capacity is reached 42. In this theory, the two tasks compete for the same pool of limited resources. However, multiple resources theory states that there are several attentional resources, each with limited capacity, and the amount of specific resources required for performing certain tasks depends on the tasks characteristics. Under the assumption of multiple resource pools, the execution of two concurrent tasks only suffers if some of the resources required to perform one of the tasks are also necessary to perform the other task. Thus, when two tasks are performed simultaneously, the competition for available

Figure 1: Mean concentrating reaction times and mean distracted reaction times of 50 Creighton University students. The mean for each condition is shown with a black X. The differences were deemed significant by the paired t-test (t = -2.8715, df = 49, p-value = 0.0060).

Stereotyping says females are the queens of multitasking, but are we? As I begun my research on multitasking, I found an array of discoveries made by a wide range of people, from students like myself to average adults to credible professionals. Nothing was constant.

Today, our world seems to move at a million miles an hour. Whether you are a college student studying for three different midterms while facetiming your friends and family, a mom who needs to drop off her son at soccer practice while taking an important conference call, a store manager trying to deal with an unhappy customer while simultaneously restocking shelves, or a high school student trying to write a history paper while hanging out with friends and stretching before basketball practice, “multitasking,” is inevitably becoming part of daily life. Today’s generation actively “multitasks”, whether they realize it or not, it could be argued that this is good or bad.

It’s not undeniable that multi-tasking can help us succeed and finish our tasks in a timelier manner- but how is the quality of our own finished products? Are we accomplishing what we need to accomplish? An act such as multi-tasking gives us opportunities to balance our everyday lives but instead we let it hurt us. Multi-tasking affects us socially, allowing us not to communicate with others due to how busy we are. It affects us in our cognitive skills, disallowing us from processing and using the information stored in our brain to achieve our fullest potential. Limiting and regulating how and when we multi-task can help us reach our full potential. Learning to take on specific tasks at a time will help us appreciate the things we work on for what they truly are. As we take on numerous things, our processing methods do not let us achieve our fullest ability, as we are weak in

The following experiment was written by Yvonne Ellis, Bobbie Daniels and Andres Jauregui. The main writer from this experiment is going to be Ellis. This generation of students in the following experiment thinks that by multitasking which is doing two or more things at once that they can eliminate the amount of time that it takes to do something. But the research done by a neuroscientists show that the brain loses the ability to receive information in an experiment that was written for the Research in higher Education Journal that involved sixty-two students that are taking an accounting principles class at a University in the Southeastern United States. The major that half of the students are in is General Business. The experiment was that

The processes of thought have been investigated for so long. Psychologists have investigated the brain’s involvement in the speed of processing information whether it is relevant or irrelevant. The two brain areas involved in the executive function of speed processing is the anterior cingulate and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This study compares the phenomenon of speed processing with the evidence from past research among Stroop(1935), Windes(1968), Macleod(1991) and a number of others. Through the years the Stroop study has been used as the framework on demonstrating the phenomenon of speed processing involving relevant and irrelevant information. Windes’ study has elaborated on reaction times of subjects for quantity naming and numeral naming. Macleod’s study ermphasized similarities and differences among many hypotheses; collaborating Stroop’s study. His study evaluates the pilosophical positions that arose from Stroop those of which include the relative speed of processing and automaticity.