An Investigation of the Dual Task Performance Relationship to Hemispheric Specialization

摘要

The efficiency of dual task performance may be influenced by a number of variables such as the level of practice of the individual, the difficulty of the task, and the particular processing resources or capacities for which the two tasks compete. The current research investigates the relation between the capacities employed in two tasks--a verbal processing resource inferred to reside in the left cerebral hemisphere, and a spatial resource in the right--and the controlling hand. Specifically a condition of task-hemispheric integrity is defined when the processing and responding of each task is carried out in a single cerebral hemisphere. In the experiment, this condition occurs when a tracking task, inferred to be spatial right-hemispheric in its processing is controlled with the left hand, while a Sternberg memory search Reaction Time task with the letter stimuli, inferred to be verbal left hemispheric, is responded to with the right hand. A 'mixture' condition is created with the opposite hand assignment, so that each hemisphere processes the information associated with one task, while responding to the other (i.e., Sternberg Task-left hand, Tracking-right hand).