Multitasking

Basic mechanisms and applied aspects (with an emphasis on oculomotor control)

With respect to multitasking, we are primarily interested in how multiple action demands can be coordinated concurrently. Specific research topics include the question of whether we are able to select several actions simultaneously, and how action demands are processed across different response modalities (e.g., speaking while concurrently moving ourhands). Additionally, we are interested in how exactly we are able to prioritize specific action modalities. For example, our data suggest that we principally place more weight on eye movement control than on vocal control, whereas vocal control appears to dominate manual control. Within this field of research, we strongly emphasizethe (previously neglected) study ofeye movements: Are eye movements (which usually occur all the time) controlled in an automatic fashion, or are they prone to interference from other action demands? Interestingly, we could show that even tiny movements of the eye (i.e., saccades) can reliably interfere with small finger movements. On the other hand, voluntary inhibition of eye movements (remaining fixated) can also result in performance costs regarding other simultaneous action demands. Taken together, these observations touch on the more general issue of to what extent our mental representations of output (effector) systems are organized in a modular or, alternatively, in a highly interactive manner (crosstalk). Apart from these basic research questions, we are also interested in how these basic phenomena transfer to more realistic, everyday scenarios (e.g., reading aloud, where we simultaneously move our eyes through the text and vocalize the sentences).