Training-induced plasticity of multitasking in everyday-like motor behavior

• Applicant: Professorin Claudia Voelcker-Rehage, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 406540568

Many activities of daily life involve sensorimotor and cognitive multitasking. Often-cited examples are driving a car, shopping in a supermarket and crossing a street in busy traffic. Previous research documented that multitasking skills decline with advancing age, which could compromise older persons’ safety and independence in everyday life. It is still not clear how training regimes should be designed to effectively and efficiently exploit the training-induced plasticity of multitasking and thus to facilitate older persons’ participation in everyday activities. A main obstacle in understanding the problem and its possible solutions is that nearly all our knowledge about multitasking comes from typical laboratory paradigms which differ from normal life in two important ways. First, they administer not more than two tasks concurrently or alternately, while everyday activities usually involve an ever-changing sequence of tasks. Second, they administer tasks with no practical purpose, while everyday life is usually driven by purpose. To overcome these methodological barriers, we developed and evaluated in phase 1 of this project two new and more realistic experimental paradigms for the study of multitasking. In a virtual-reality setup, participants either drive a car or cross a busy street while concurrently responding to an ever-changing sequence of loading tasks which simulate everyday activities; the loading tasks use different sensory modalities, engage different cognitive processes and require different motor outputs. We found that age-related deficits emerge in these realistic multitasking paradigms as well, and that they are dramatically high when loading tasks require gaze changes and parallel visual processing. Research objective 1 (RO1) for the second SPP phase will determine whether multitasking performance in our realistic paradigms is better, equal or worse than that in classical paradigms that involve only two concurrent or two alternating tasks. RO2 will explore a new training regime, which builds upon existing theories about the central mechanisms of action control. This regime takes into account that the available capacity of those mechanisms is not the same for all individuals, and different persons therefore should be trained in different ways. We will compare the benefits of such personalized training to those of conventional, fixed training. RO3 will investigate the neuronal underpinning of realistic multitasking. To this end, we will register participants’ brain activation while they engage in realistic or classical paradigms. Taken together, the proposed research should expand our knowledge about realistic multitasking and its adaptive plasticity, and should highlight new avenues for the training of older adults’ multitasking skills.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1772: Human performance under multiple cognitive task requirements: From basic mechanisms to optimized task scheduling
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Otmar Bock