Allocation of effort as a function of payoffs for individual tasks in a multitasking environment

SYNWORK1 software allows the examination of how payoffs affect the allocation of effort by people when they perform four different tasks (memory search, arithmetic, visual monitoring, and auditory monitoring). In a previous study (Wang, Proctor, & Pick, 2007), we showed that participants adopted multitasking strategies allocating relative effort appropriate to payoff differences between the arithmetic and memory tasks, but that they exhibited residual effects of prior payoffs when the payoffs were switched. In the present study, we varied the payoff in two different experiments for only one of these tasks, the memory task in Experiment 1 and the arithmetic task in Experiment 2. Doing this allowed consideration of performance for both the task for which payoff changed explicitly and the other cognitive task, for which the payoff difference was implicit (i.e., relative to the explicit payoff that was manipulated). Although participants adjusted performance on the task for which the payoff explicitly varied, the payoff manipulation had less effect than did the explicit payoff manipulations for both tasks used previously. Also, the change in effort on a task resulting from explicitly increasing its payoff was less than that from decreasing the payoff. SYNWORK1 is a good environment for studying multitasking, but has several limitations that need to be addressed to provide a synthetic work environment that allows investigation of a wider range of theoretically relevant issues.