Let's get physical: the dual-task costs of multiple motor responses

Dual-task costs occur when attention is divided among two or more concurrent tasks. Most dual-task studies involve paradigms where participants complete two, concurrent cognitive tasks; in these studies, performance on one or both tasks are slower and/or less accurate. The goal of this study was to examine whether dual-task costs would exist when participants completed a cognitive task while walking and whether those costs would be greater when the cognitive task required a motor-based response or when the task was more difficult. Twenty-two college students completed four blocks of a visual search task while walking. The difficult and the manual blocks were associated with the greatest accuracy costs, but performance was slower in both the difficult and the verbal modality blocks. These findings indicate that dual-task costs do occur, even when one of the tasks is walking, and that costs are greatest when the concurrent task is especially difficult.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Author dc:creator

• Hutson, Taylor Nicole

Contributors dc:contributor

• Clark, Amanda J.
• Shelton, Jill; Ozbek, Irene Nichols, 1947-
• College of Arts and Sciences

• Attention
• Distraction (Psychology)
• Perception

Licence

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language

English, eng

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholar.utc.edu/theses/644

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholar.utc.edu:theses-1811