title: Deliberation's blindsight: how cognitive load can improve judgments.
abstract: Multitasking poses a major challenge in modern work environments by putting the worker under cognitive load. Performance decrements often occur when people are under high cognitive load because they switch to less demanding--and often less accurate--cognitive strategies. Although cognitive load disturbs performance over a wide range of tasks, it may also carry benefits. In the experiments reported here, we showed that judgment performance can increase under cognitive load. Participants solved a multiple-cue judgment task in which high performance could be achieved by using a similarity-based judgment strategy but not by using a more demanding rule-based judgment strategy. Accordingly, cognitive load induced a shift to a similarity-based judgment strategy, which consequently led to more accurate judgments. By contrast, shifting to a similarity-based strategy harmed judgments in a task best solved by using a rule-based strategy. These results show how important it is to consider the cognitive strategies people rely on to understand how people perform in demanding work environments.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Switzerland. janina.hoffmann@unibas.ch
authors.forename: Janina A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Hoffmann
authors.forename: Bettina
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: von Helversen
authors.forename: Jörg
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rieskamp
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: cognitive processes; divided attention; implicit memory; judgment