Abstract
This study shows that subjects, while shadowing a primary message, can monitor two additional messages as well as they can monitor a single one. In addition, monitoring for targets on the primary message is not impaired more by two than by one additional message to monitor, and performance on all monitoring tasks appears to approach an asymptote of no interference. These findings contradict any limited-capacity theory of attention that attempts to use speeded time sharing of limited resources to explain the fact that subjects can perform two skilled tasks at once. If subjects were time sharing at any stage of practice, an increase in the number of alternative channels to be monitored would have made performance worse.
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Banks, W.P., Zender, J.P. A test of time sharing in auditory attention. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 22, 541–544 (1984). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333902
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333902