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Coordinating cognitive information: task effects and individual differences in integrating information from several
P L Yee1, E Hunt, J W Pellegrino
1University of Washington.
Cognitive Psychology
|October 1, 1991
Summary
Coordinating information from multiple sources, like driving while listening to directions, involves a distinct cognitive ability separate from processing each source alone. This coordination is not merely resource allocation but a unique cognitive task.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive psychology
- Human-computer interaction
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Humans frequently integrate information from diverse sensory modalities and communication channels.
- Tasks like driving necessitate coordinating visual-spatial and auditory-verbal information streams.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether information coordination is a distinct cognitive ability.
- To determine if coordination is a separate task or simply resource allocation.
Main Methods:
- Four experiments were conducted to examine information coordination.
- Tasks involved coordinating verbal components with visual-spatial and auditory components.
Main Results:
- The ability to coordinate perceptual and verbal information is distinct from processing each modality independently.
- A simple resource-sharing model failed to explain the observed coordination phenomena.
Conclusions:
- Information coordination represents a unique cognitive function, not reducible to resource allocation among component tasks.
- A dual-processing model is proposed where perceptual reasoning is independent, but its propositional transformation is influenced by concurrent verbal processing.