Reaching while calculating: scheduling of cognitive and perceptual-motor processes.
To address the neglected question of how cognitive and perceptual-motor processes are coordinated, the authors asked participants to move a cursor from one target to another to reveal operators and operands for a running arithmetic task. In Experiment I performance on this task was compared with performance on tasks requiring only aiming or only arithmetic. Aiming was faster in the aiming-only task than in the combined task. More importantly, times for steps requiring calculation were equivalent in the combined and arithmetic-only tasks. The results from this and a second experiment suggest that participants slowed their aiming to allow calculations to be completed before subsequent targets were entered. As a whole, the results suggest that cognitive and perceptual-motor processes are coordinated through scheduling.
Shin
Jacqueline C
JC
Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, USA. js4fh@virginia.edu
Rosenbaum
David A
DA
D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D008433:Mathematics; D009039:Motion Perception; D011897:Random Allocation