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Let's Get Physical: The Dual-Task Costs Of Multiple Motor Responses, Taylor Nicole Hutson

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Dual-task costs occur when attention is divided among two or more concurrent tasks. Most dual-task studies involve paradigms where participants complete two, concurrent cognitive tasks; in these studies, performance on one or both tasks are slower and/or less accurate. The goal of this study was to examine whether dual-task costs would exist when participants completed a cognitive task while walking and whether those costs would be greater when the cognitive task required a motor-based response or when the task was more difficult. Twenty-two college students completed four blocks of a visual search task while walking. The difficult and the manual …