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In modern life, people face many different situations that afford multitasking. Usually such situations are associated with performance decrements, failures, and risks of accidents. This Priority Programme aims to bring together different lines of research on human performance under such multiple cognitive task requirements (i.e. multitasking) in order to provide a new integrative theoretical framework to account for this fundamental aspect of human behaviour. Traditional theories in cognitive psychology consider motor actions as a "late" output-related aspect in the chain of information processing steps that can be studied independently from "central" cognitive processes. However, the notion that motor and cognitive processes are functionally independent is challenged because motor processes are crucial for many forms of skill and often represent a particularly challenging part of task performance. Yet, despite the strong connection of cognition and motor control, cognitive psychology and movement sciences consider the topic "multitasking" from fundamentally different perspectives. While psychology mainly focusses on structural and functional limitations of cognitive processes when facing multiple cognitive task requirements, movement science emphasises the plasticity of cognition and the possibility of training. In this Priority Programme, we aim to focus on multiple cognitive task requirements of human performance.

Therefore, contributions of cognitive psychology and movement science constitute the core disciplines. Of course, other disciplines, such as cognitive neuroscience, that can help to improve our understanding of cognitive and performance aspects of multitasking may provide important contributions to the work programme.
This combined effort allows the proposed Priority Programme to provide an integrated framework that brings together the issues of structure, flexibility, and plasticity in human multitasking. Specifically, this programme aims at generating a scientific matrix that consists of an array of research topics clustered in the following three broad Areas:

- First, it will provide a new, integrative theoretical framework that reconciles the structural perspective of immutable processing bottlenecks with the more flexible cognitive-control perspective.

- Second, it will re-examine a flexible processing resources metaphor by referring both to the structural perspective in terms of modality-specific capacities and the flexibility perspective in terms of task requirements, motivational, and emotional modulation.

- Third, it will assess the plasticity of human cognition and motor behaviour with respect to action optimisation in multiple task situations by focussing on training schedules and the resulting learning processes.
In sum, the present programme is aimed at addressing a new research perspective by integrating existing knowledge on a fundamental aspect of human behaviour (i.e., "multitasking") across different theoretical perspectives and scientific disciplines. This basic research can also contribute to research in more applied contexts, which require high performance in multitasking.

Further Information:
http://www.dfg.de/foerderung/info_wissenschaft/info_wissenschaft_14_16/index.html
http://www.spp1772.uni-wuerzburg.de/