Crosstalk, not resource competition, as a source of dual-task costs: Evidence from manipulating stimulus-action effect conceptual compatibility
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-021-01903-2
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Summary
This study investigates the theoretical origins of dual-task costs, specifically distinguishing between multiple resource competition and crosstalk accounts. While both theories explain why performance declines when two tasks are performed simultaneously, they offer different mechanisms for interference. Resource theories posit that costs arise from sharing limited processing capacities, whereas crosstalk theories argue that interference stems from the activation of overlapping representations during central operations. The authors aimed to adjudicate between these accounts by manipulating the conceptual compatibility between stimuli and post-response action effects, while holding stimulus and response modalities constant. The experimental design involved 90 participants performing a dual-task paradigm consisting of a visual-manual (VM) task and an auditory-manual (AM) task. Participants responded to visual stimuli (sun or tree) and auditory stimuli (pig oink or horse neigh) with manual key presses. Critically, each response was followed by an experimentally induced action effect. The study manipulated the conceptual relationship between the stimulus and its corresponding effect across three conditions: Conceptual-Compatible (CC), where the effect matched the stimulus (e.g., sun stimulus → sun effect); Conceptual-Within (CW), where the effect matched the other stimulus within the same task (e.g., sun stimulus → tree effect); and Conceptual-Between (CB), where the effect matched a stimulus from the *other* task (e.g., sun stimulus → pig effect). This design ensured that modality-specific resources remained identical across conditions, isolating conceptual overlap as the variable of interest. The results revealed distinct patterns for single-task performance and dual-task costs. Single-task response times were longest in the CW condition, indicating that incompatible stimulus-effect mappings within a task slowed individual performance. However, dual-task costs—measured as the increase in response time when performing both tasks versus single tasks—were significantly larger in the CB condition compared to the CC and CW conditions. Specifically, dual-task costs were 548 ms in the CB condition, whereas they were 368 ms and 379 ms in the CC and CW conditions, respectively. This pattern contradicts resource competition theories, which would predict higher costs in the CW condition due to the longer single-task response times indicating higher resource demand. Instead, the increased costs in the CB condition suggest that conceptual overlap between tasks caused interference. The authors conclude that these findings support the crosstalk account of dual-task costs. The data indicate that post-response action effects are integrated into task representations engaged by central operations during response selection. When conceptual codes overlap across tasks (as in the CB condition), the activation of one task’s stimulus interferes with the central operations of the other task, leading to greater performance impairment. This demonstrates that dual-task costs are driven by representational interference between concurrently active task sets rather than merely by competition for domain-general or modality-specific resources.
Key finding
Dual-task costs were significantly larger when conceptual representations overlapped between tasks, supporting the crosstalk account over resource competition theories.
Methodology
lab_experiment
Sample size: 90
Provenance
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | author_sweep | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-28 |
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| extract | success | cached | — | — | 3 | 2026-06-10 |
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| enrich | failed | — | — | — | 4 | 2026-07-02 |
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| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 15 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.
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