How does practice reduce dual-task interference: integration, automatization, or just stage-shortening?

Abstract

The present study assessed three hypotheses of how practice reduces dual-task interference: Practice teaches participants to efficiently integrate performance of a task pair; practice promotes automatization of individual tasks, allowing the central bottleneck to be bypassed; practice leaves the bottleneck intact but shorter in duration. These hypotheses were tested in two transfer-of-training experiments. Participants received one of three training types (Task 1 only, or Task 2 only, or dual-task), followed by dual-task test sessions. Practice effects in Experiment 1 (Task 1: auditory-vocal; Task 2: visual-manual) were fully explained by the intact bottleneck hypothesis, without task integration or automatization. This hypothesis also accounted well for the majority of participants when the task order was reversed (Experiment 2). In this case, however, there were multiple indicators that several participants had succeeded in eliminating the bottleneck by automatizing one or both tasks. Neither experiment provided any evidence that practice promotes efficient task integration.