Dual-task studies assessed the effects of cellular-phone conversations on performance of a simulated driving task. Performance was not disrupted by listening to radio broadcasts or listening to a book on tape. Nor was it disrupted by a continuous shadowing task using a handheld phone, ruling out, in this case, dual-task interpretations associated with holding the phone, listening, or speaking, However significant interference was observed in a word-generation variant of the shadowing task, and this deficit increased with the difficulty of driving. Moreover unconstrained conversations using either a handheld or a hands-free cell phone resulted in a twofold increase in the failure to detect simulated traffic signals and slower reactions to those signals that were detected. We suggest that cellular-phone use disrupts performance by diverting attention to an engaging cognitive context other than the one immediately associated with driving.

This research examined the effects of hands-free cell phone conversations on simulated driving. The authors found that these conversations impaired driver's reactions to vehicles braking in front of them. The authors assessed whether this impairment could be attributed to a withdrawal of attention from the visual scene, yielding a form of inattention blindness. Cell phone conversations impaired explicit recognition memory for roadside billboards. Eye-tracking data indicated that this was due to reduced attention to foveal information. This interpretation was bolstered by data showing that cell phone conversations impaired implicit perceptual memory for items presented at fixation. The data suggest that the impairment of driving performance produced by cell phone conversations is mediated, at least in part, by reduced attention to visual inputs.

The authors examined the question of whether a decrease in the efficiency of inhibitory processing with aging is a general phenomenon. Thirty elderly and 32 young adults performed a series of tasks from which the authors could extract measures of inhibitory function. The tasks and task components included response compatibility, negative priming, stopping, spatial precuing, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), and the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ). Only limited evidence for age-related differences in inhibitory function was obtained. Old adults had more difficulty than young adults in stopping an overt response and adopting new rules in a categorization task. However, elderly and young adults produced equivalent negative priming effects, response compatibility effects, spatial precuing effects, and self-reported cognitive failures. The findings are discussed in terms of the relationship between aging, inhibitory processes, and neuroanatomical and physiological function.A dominant view in the aging literature is that cognitive decline in later life is the result of a progressive and generalized slowing of information-processing activities (Birren, 1974;Cerella, 1990;Salthouse, 1992). Much of the evidence for such a view has been provided through reanalyses of existing data sets (Cerella, 1985b;Myerson, Hale, Wagstaff, Poon, & Smith, 1991;Salthouse, 1985). Examination oflarge numbers of tasks has suggested that reaction times (RTs) of elderly subjects can be described as simple linear or nonlinear functions of young subjects' RTs, without reference to the specific nature of the tasks. Although this generalized-slowing view provides a good account of RT data in a multitude of studies (but see Baron & Mattila, 1989;Fisk, Fisher, & Rogers, 1992), such a view has, for the most part, been descriptive rather than theoretical in nature (but see Cerella, 1990).An important question is what processes or mechanisms are responsible for this generalized slowing that occurs during aging? One relatively recent proposal that could provide the theoretical basis for generalized slowing concerns inhibitory function. Hasher and Zacks (1988; see also Zacks & Hasher, in press) suggested that age-related processing deficits in a variety of cog- We are indebted to Susan Gass for assistance in data collection, with special thanks to Heather Pringle for her invaluable assistance in data management and project organization. We express our appreciation to Tram Neill and Joan McDowd for their helpful comments on a draft of this article.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Arthur F. Kramer, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois, 405 North Mathews Avenue, Urbana, Illinois 61801. nitive skills could be accounted for by a decrease in the efficiency of inhibitory processing during aging. More specifically, inefficient inhibition could result in ineffective selective attention, which could, in turn, result in the intrusion of task irrelevant information into working memory. The consequences of the entrance of...

The authors examined whether the learning and performance of dual tasks by young and old adults could be enhanced through training. Adults were trained with either a fixed-priority or variable-priority training strategy on a monitoring task and an alphabet–arithmetic task and then transferred to a scheduling and a paired-associates running memory task. Participants in the variable-priority condition learned the monitoring and alphabet–arithmetic tasks more quickly and achieved a higher level of mastery on these tasks than did those in the fixed-priority condition. Moreover, participants trained with the variable-priority technique showed evidence of the development of automatic processing and a more rapid rate of learning and higher level of mastery of the transfer tasks than did the fixed-priority participants. These results are discussed in terms of the mechanisms that underlie learning and performance of dual tasks and with respect to potential applications.

The present study examined the relationship between personality and individual differences in multi-tasking ability. Participants enrolled at the University of Utah completed measures of multi-tasking activity, perceived multi-tasking ability, impulsivity, and sensation seeking. In addition, they performed the Operation Span in order to assess their executive control and actual multi-tasking ability. The findings indicate that the persons who are most capable of multi-tasking effectively are not the persons who are most likely to engage in multiple tasks simultaneously. To the contrary, multi-tasking activity as measured by the Media Multitasking Inventory and self-reported cell phone usage while driving were negatively correlated with actual multi-tasking ability. Multi-tasking was positively correlated with participants’ perceived ability to multi-task ability which was found to be significantly inflated. Participants with a strong approach orientation and a weak avoidance orientation – high levels of impulsivity and sensation seeking – reported greater multi-tasking behavior. Finally, the findings suggest that people often engage in multi-tasking because they are less able to block out distractions and focus on a singular task. Participants with less executive control - low scorers on the Operation Span task and persons high in impulsivity - tended to report higher levels of multi-tasking activity.