Effect of Practice

• Practice had been seen to improve dual task performance.
• Controlled Processing: When a task requires conscious control and is high in cognitive demand
• Automatic Processing: This does not require conscious control and is also difficult to control consciously. It also uses little processing capacity. E.g. Skilled driver or musician

Stroop Task & Automatic Processing

• The Stroop Task required participants to say the colour a word is written in. The words are presented as other colour names.
• Participants tend to find difficulty in this task as they say the colour written in the word rather than the colour of the text.
• this indicates and provides evidence for the automatic processing of language.

Consistent Mapping Task

• Schneider and Shriffin (1977)
• The participant is given a target, and is presented with serial frames. They must identify when the target is present in a frame.
• Initially, participants had 55% correct performance, however after 900 trials, they reached 90% correct performance. This occurs without any intervention, and leads to the used of only a few cognitive resources.
• An increase in the number of characters in either memory set or distractor had no effect on performance.

Varied Mapping Task

• Schneider and Shriffin (1977)
• The memory and distractor sets are always letters. a letter can be in the memory set in one trial then become a distractor later. The distractor in one trial can also become the target on another
• Results: This is found to be so difficult that the participants don't achieve automatic processing, even with practice.
• In contrast with the consistent mapping task, increasing the number of characters caused a decrease in performance.
• Performance was only successful if distractors were shown for 400msec rather than 120 msec. Performance was still only 50% correct however in contrast to 90% in the consistent task which had faster presentations.