Does the central bottleneck encompass voluntary selection of hedonically based choices?

A large literature on multitasking bottlenecks suggests that people cannot generally make decisions or select responses in two different tasks at the same time. However, these tasks have all involved retrieving preinstructed responses, rather than spontaneously choosing actions based on anticipated hedonic consequences. To assess whether the same bottlenecks encompasses voluntary choices, a gambling decision was utilized as the second of two tasks in a psychological refractory period (PRP) design. Three decision-related factors were identified that affected latency of responding in the gambling task. All proved to be additive with stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) in dual-task blocks. The results indicate that making a choice to try to optimize outcomes is subject to the same processing bottleneck as the retrieval of preinstructed responses that has been the mainstay of attention and performance research.