02-05-2014, 04:34 PM
Doing Two Things at the Same Time
Doing Two Things.pdf (Size: 317.06 KB / Downloads: 246)
People routinely do two or more
things at the same time. They eat
breakfast while reading the news-
paper; they make calls on a cellular
telephone while driving a car; and, of
course, they chew gum while walking.
If you ask people to assess their own
ability to keep two activities going at
once, they generally report difficulty
only if one of the tasks is intellectually
demanding; for example, they may
have a hard time carrying on a serious
discussion while adding up a restau-
rant check. If the tasks are routine, people
are quite sure they can handle at least
two simultaneously.
Recent research suggests that these as-
sessments of the human capacity for par-
allel processing may be over-optimistic.
It appears that certain mental operations
are "bottlenecks" that require the exclu-
sive use of some cognitive resource and
therefore cannot be done concurrently. In
particular, even the most trivial forms of
decision-making and memory retrieval
seem to be activities that cannot be over-
lapped with other operations. Much of
what people perceive as parallel processing
in mental life may really be more like
computer time sharing, in which some
mental operations are actually carried
out one at a time.