Investigating Eye Movements, Attention, and Multitasking with MATB-II

摘要

Multitasking requires people to perform more than one task simultaneously and it is desired for many tasks or jobs (e.g., air traffic control, etc.). Individual differences have great implications in multitasking and specific characteristics (e.g., working memory capacity, attention, timesharing ability, etc.) have frequently been used as criteria for personnel selection (König et al., 2005; Salomon et al., 2015). To explore different predictors of multitasking, attention has been indicated as a significant contributor to multitasking performance since the greater amount of attention people pay to the task, the easier is for them to focus their attention and achieve better performance (König et al., 2005). Three functions are thought to be components of attention: alerting, orienting, and executive control (Fan et al., 2002). The alerting function can help people to reach and maintain an alert state, while the orienting function can assist people to select specific sensory information (Fan et al., 2002). Executive function involves the cognitive processes of monitoring, detecting signals, and providing responses. While research has indicated the alerting function has been linked to task switching (Arrington & Yates, 2009), no research has explored alerting and orienting function with eye tracking during multitasking performance.