Effort in Multitasking: Local and Global Assessment of Effort

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Self-organization of task order may outperform external scheduling by optimizing processing and increasing commitment.
• However, self-organization demands executive control, potentially increasing time and effort.
• Assessing both local performance and global effort measures is key to understanding multitasking dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare self-organized versus externally controlled task scheduling.
• To investigate the role of task preview in self-organized multitasking.
• To evaluate the utility of global effort measures alongside local performance metrics.

Main Methods:

• Experimental approach combining dual tasking and task switching paradigms.
• Comparison of free-choice task sequence (self-organized) versus cued task sequence (externally controlled).
• Measurement of local performance (response time, errors) and global subjective/objective effort.

Main Results:

• Self-organization with task preview improved local performance (faster responses, fewer errors) compared to cued sequencing.
• The self-organized group reported higher global effort despite performance benefits.
• Reduced task preview in a second experiment diminished differences between self-organized and cued conditions.

Conclusions:

• Self-organization in task scheduling is effortful, even when beneficial for task processing.
• Global assessment of effort provides valuable insights into multitasking beyond local performance.
• The findings suggest that measuring global effort is a useful tool for multitasking research.