Strategic Adaptation to Performance Objectives in a Dual‐Task Setting

Abstract

How do people interleave attention when multitasking? One dominant account is that the completion of a subtask serves as a cue to switch tasks. But what happens if switching solely at subtask boundaries led to poor performance? We report a study in which participants manually dialed a UK-style telephone number while driving a simulated vehicle. If the driver were to exclusively return his or her attention to driving after completing a subtask (i.e., using the single break in the xxxxxxxxxxx representational structure of the number), then we would expect to see a relatively poor driving performance. In contrast, our results show that drivers choose to return attention to steering control before the natural subtask boundary. A computational modeling analysis shows that drivers had to adopt this strategy to meet the required performance objective of maintaining an acceptable lateral position in the road while dialing. Taken together these results support the idea that people can strategically control the allocation of attention in multitask settings to meet specific performance criteria.

Modeling visual sampling on in-car displays: The challenge of predicting safety-critical lapses of control

“…However, the relationship in real traffic between lane deviation and crash risk is unknown, whereas there is a wealth of evidence of the more direct association between crash risk and long off road glances (Liang et al, 2012). It seems that in general, drivers do not try to optimize their lane position while multitasking and some lateral deviation is allowed even if the driving is prioritized (Janssen and Brumby, 2010). Keeping the own lane seems to be a sufficient and more critical goal than keeping an optimal lane position at all times, which is why we focus on glance metrics here.…”

“…Janssen and Brumby (2010) have shown that people sometimes strategically control the allocation of attention in multitasking to meet specific performance criteria. For our purposes, for example, one might imagine strategic tradeoffs between stable driving and finishing a screen by a slightly longer in-car glance than the current time limit would allow, as discussed above.…”

Priming Drivers before Handover in Semi-Autonomous Cars

“…In the domain of driving, multiple studies have looked at how drivers interleave nondriving, secondary tasks with driving. A common strategy is to wait for 'natural breakpoints' in the task to switch attention [11,12,26,27,28,48]; for example, Iqbal et al showed that drivers chunked a task of providing directions while driving into multiple steps and reoriented to driving at the boundaries between chunks [26]. There are many advantages of interleaving at natural breakpoints: it reduces mental workload [3,49] as it reduces information that needs to be maintained in memory [7], it frees mental resources such as visual attention for other tasks [50,55], it reduces stress [4], it reduces the time needed for later task resumption (cf.…”

“…We therefore also included conditions in which drivers performed non-driving tasks. As the structure of the task can also impact when drivers look at the road [12,27,28], we used two tasks. Half the drivers performed a video transcription task while the other half performed a calendar task.…”

The Effects of Sequence and Delay on Crowd Work

“…For example, people who dial a phone while driving have to take moments to reexamine the road and adjust their course during interruptions [9]. In the case of microtasking, one might imagine the repeated sense-making that workers may have to do as they interleave and interrupt different varieties of tasks.…”