The Importance Of Task Switching

Task switching is a habit that every individual has partaken in from time to time. Whether it be when someone is trying to do homework and listen to music or watch television and eat. Individuals most likely do not realize when they are performing two tasks at once. The current review provides a summary of previous research on this topic. First, the review will focus on the background of task switching, such as what it is. Second, it will focus on how the task switching works and how much attention is allocated to each task. In the final and third part of the review, it will focus on how task switching is affected while performing different tasks. Task Switching: A Review When the time calls for an individual to perform two tasks at once, …show more content…
The reason why it is considered to be unpredictable is because the tasks are repeated in a random order. However, there is a way to differentiate which task is required at a moment, is due to the task being followed before or after a specific stimulus. Similarly to the previous paradigm, predictable task-switching, the participants’ performance during the switch trials are compared with their performance during the repetition trials. However, the results showed that participants tended to do worse during the switch trials. Kiesel mentions that the results also found that the participants’ response times tended to show a decrease when the tasks were repeated over the span of several trials. Nonetheless, Kiesel and her colleagues also mention in their article, that one of the negatives of the task-cuing paradigm allows for a variation among the intervals between the cue and the stimulus. The next paradigm that was mentioned in Kiesel’s article was the intermittent instruction …show more content…
However, in order to allow for this self-choice option happen the stimuli needed to be bivalent. This means that the stimuli needed to be functional or similar for both tasks. During the experiments that used this paradigm, the responses of what task the participants decided to choose were dedicated to certain keys/buttons. By doing this, it allowed for the researchers to be able to determine which task was chosen just by looking at the participant’s responses. However, there was a tendency during the results that the switch costs occurred more often. Another researcher mentions how there are five indicators of maturation of task