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A Critical Test of the Failure-to-Engage Theory of Task-Switching
| Citations: | 6 - 3 self |
BibTeX
@MISC{Brown_acritical,
author = {Scott Brown and Curtis Lehmann},
title = { A Critical Test of the Failure-to-Engage Theory of Task-Switching },
year = {}
}
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Abstract
When people switch between two tasks, their performance on each is worse than when they perform that task in isolation. This "switch cost" has been extensively studied, and many theories have been proposed to explain it. One influential theory is the "failure to engage" (FTE) theory, which posits that observed responses are a mixture of prepared and unprepared response strategies. The probability that participants use prepared processes can be manipulated experimentally, by changing preparation time, for example. The FTE theory is a binary mixture model, and therefore makes a strong prediction about the existence of fixed points in response time distributions. We found evidence contradicting this prediction, using data from 54 participants in a standard task-switching paradigm.
