The multitasking motorist and the attention economy

Strayer, DL; Getty, D; Biondi, F; Cooper, JM · 2021 · publications_jsonl

DOI: 10.1037/0000208-007

archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified

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Summary

This study investigates whether individual differences exist in multitasking ability, specifically challenging the prevailing theory that all drivers suffer performance decrements when using cell phones while driving. While cognitive science generally posits that attention has limited capacity and that dual-tasking inevitably leads to impaired performance on one or both tasks, the authors sought to determine if a small subset of the population possesses extraordinary multitasking capabilities. The research was motivated by anecdotal claims from drivers who believe they are unaffected by phone use, despite robust evidence linking cell phone conversations to delayed brake reaction times, inattention blindness, and increased accident rates. To test this, Watson and Strayer conducted an experiment with 200 undergraduate participants using a high-fidelity driving simulator. Participants performed two conditions: a single-task condition involving only driving or only an auditory Operation Span (OSPAN) task, and a dual-task condition requiring them to drive while simultaneously performing the OSPAN task. The driving task required participants to follow a pace car that braked intermittently, measuring brake reaction time and following distance. The OSPAN task, a measure of executive attention, required participants to memorize words while solving math problems. The study aimed to identify "supertaskers," defined as individuals who showed no significant performance decline in either task when performed concurrently compared to single-task baselines. The results confirmed that the vast majority of participants exhibited significant bidirectional interference, with degraded performance in both driving metrics and OSPAN scores during the dual-task condition. However, 2.5% of the sample (five individuals) were identified as supertaskers. These individuals scored in the top quartile for all single-task measures and showed absolutely no performance decrements when multitasking. Statistical analysis, including Monte Carlo simulations, demonstrated that the frequency of supertaskers was significantly greater than chance, ruling out statistical fluke or regression to the mean. Furthermore, follow-up testing revealed that supertaskers maintained superior performance on other executive attention tasks, such as the dual n-back, indicating that their ability is a stable trait rather than task-specific. The findings suggest that while most people are impaired by concurrent driving and phone use, a rare subset of individuals possesses exceptional executive attention capabilities that allow for perfect time-sharing. The authors conclude that supertaskers likely represent an extreme end of the stability/plasticity continuum in cognitive processing. This discovery highlights the importance of incorporating individual differences into theories of attention and cognitive control. Identifying these individuals provides a unique opportunity to understand the neural and genetic mechanisms that prevent cognitive breakdown during high-demand multitasking, offering insights that group-average studies cannot provide.

Key finding

Distraction harms driving by degrading SPIDER-related processes, lowering situation awareness in a continuous loss/recovery curve that persists 20-60 s past task offset; the same framework predicts vehicle automation will produce analogous loss of situation awareness during monitoring and a recovery cost at takeover.

Methodology

theoretical

Provenance

The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via tag_papers on 2026-05-30 (3 acquisition events logged).

Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

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• situational awareness
• temporal
• manual
• distraction detection algorithms
• visual
• vigilance

Information type

What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).

• Empirical Findings: behavioral performance data
• Theoretical Contribution: theory or model, conceptual framework