Pieczykolan, A. & Huestegge, L.
RWTH Aachen University. Aachen, Germany
Multitasking usually causes performance deficits manifesting as increased response times and/or error rates. This has also been demonstrated for the simultaneous execution of saccades and manual responses. Studies so far concentrated on interference mechanisms caused by intratrial effects, whereas the role of interference between sequential trials in dual-task conditions remained largely unclear. In the present study subjects responded to a single auditory stimulus either with a saccade, a manual response or with both. The saccade was always spatially compatible to the stimulus while the manual response was not. In order to dissociate intertrial interference from intratrial interference we compared dual-task costs of pure blocks containing only stimuli on the same side (e.g. left) with mixed blocks containing stimuli on both sides (i.e. either left or right). Implications of the comparison across pure and mixed blocks for crossmodal selection mechanisms during multitasking will be discussed.