Time takes space: selective effects of multitasking on concurrent spatial processing.
Many everyday activities require coordination and monitoring of complex relations of future goals and deadlines. Cognitive offloading may provide an efficient strategy for reducing control demands by representing future goals and deadlines as a pattern of spatial relations. We tested the hypothesis that multiple-task monitoring involves time-to-space transformational processes, and that these spatial effects are selective with greater demands on coordinate (metric) than categorical (nonmetric) spatial relation processing. Participants completed a multitasking session in which they monitored four series of deadlines, running on different time scales, while making concurrent coordinate or categorical spatial judgments. We expected and found that multitasking taxes concurrent coordinate, but not categorical, spatial processing. Furthermore, males showed a better multitasking performance than females. These findings provide novel experimental evidence for the hypothesis that efficient multitasking involves metric relational processing.
Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. timo.mantyla@psychology.su.se.
Timo
T
Mäntylä
Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy.
Valentina
V
Coni
Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.
Veit
V
Kubik
Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.
Ivo
I
Todorov
Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.|Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy.
Fabio
F
Del Missier
D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D000073456:Multitasking Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception; D065855:Spatial Processing / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult
Cognitive offloading; Multitasking; Spatial relation processing; Time monitoring