Dual Goals for Speed and Accuracy on the Same Performance Task

摘要

In most work contexts, several performance goals coexist, and con?icts between them and trade-offs can occur. Our paper is the ?rst to contrast a dual goal for speed and accuracy with a single goal for speed on the same task. The Sternberg paradigm (Experiment 1, n = 57) and the d2 test (Experiment 2, n = 19) were used as performance tasks. Speed measures and errors revealed in both experiments that dual as well as single goals increase performance by enhancing memory scanning. However, the single speed goal triggered a speed-accuracy trade-off, favoring speed over accuracy, whereas this was not the case with the dual goal. In dif?cult trials, dual goals slowed down scanning processes again so that errors could be prevented. This new ?nding is particularly relevant for security domains, where both aspects have to be managed simultaneously.