Separating processes of dual-task coordination and dual-task coordination adjustment

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tilo Strobach
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 552131101

When two tasks are presented simultaneously, dual-task performance on those tasks is usually impaired compared to separate single-task performance. Numerous theories explain these emerging dual-task costs in terms of the existence of capacity limitations in the constituent component tasks. The current proposal presents a framework for dual-task coordination adjustment, in which there is the proposal of active dual-task coordination processes that work on the scheduling of these capacity-limited processes in the overlapping task paradigm. However, there are recent findings that point to a cognitive control level in addition to these active coordination processes. This additional level’s responsibility is to adjust the dual-task coordination of capacity-limited stages. The central aim of the current proposal is to characterize the processes of dual-task coordination adjustment. Furthermore, this proposal focuses on studies that investigate the separability between levels of dual-task coordination and dual-task coordination adjustment. The proposal does so from both a non-practice perspective and a practice perspective.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants