Intro to Cognitive Psychology Week 4

Zach Tran

Psychology 3051

10/1/23

Multitasking

    Generally I find that there are few things that I can definitely say that I multitask well when doing. As we learned in class, dividing one's attention between multiple tasks stresses your processing capacity and high loads and low loads can vary how much of your processing capacity is taken up. A task, however, for which I believe I can say that I can multitask moderately well in is doing intense but repetitive tasks while listening to music.

    An example of this when I am working out and listening to music. Working out in this case involves repetitive actions such as repeatedly lifting a dumbbell, running laps at a track, or doing jumping jacks. In these cases, I would describe my exercise actions as being low load tasks. They do not take up as much of my processing capacity as other tasks might. On the contrary, often I will try to clear my head and think about little else as possible when performing these tasks so that I can focus on them entirely. In these cases, the additional perceptual load of listening to music helps me rather than detracts. I find listening to music actually helps me focus because it takes out of the world, whether it be other people or things going on around me. The act of multitasking by exercising and listening to music actually helps me as I find my primary task, that is exercising, can be increased in my personal measure of performance. In addition, our reading states that performing well-learned tasks can result in multitasking and suffering no effects to performance. In this way, I also believe that the more I complete these exercises and the more accustomed I grow to listening to specific music while exercising, the more focused I can be and the better my performance.

    An example of when I multitasked but did not perform well was when I tried to pay attention to a professor's lecture while also reading and getting the information from an article. Individually, I knew that I was feeling focused and was absorbing the information well when intently listening to the lecture or reading the article in detail. However, when trying to combine these two tasks that I knew I could do well individually and I believed were related enough that it could be successful, since this article was for this same class, my efforts still resulted in poor multitasking. I found when trying to to focus on either, I would lose focus and almost completely forget and stop remembering anything of the other. These attempts would result in very clear gaps in the lecture material being recited by my professor and holes in the flow of content of the article I was trying to read. This is a good personal example of a dichostic listening experiment. Despite my best efforts to make it not the case, whichever source of information that I was not primarily focused on became an unattended channel. This inevitably resulted in the information of this unattended channel, whether it was my professor's lecture or the content of the article, being either halted in its intake or lost. Both tasks are also high load tasks which overload my processing capacity and overwhelm my senses and capacity to process and filter information.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intro to Cognitive Psychology Week 6

 Zach Tran Intro to Cognitive Psychology 10/15/23 Technology & Working Memory     I believe that overall, technology and its rapidly developing advancements are leading to worsening memory in people. Technology means that people have more access than ever to information and assistance that makes it easer to solve problems and go day-to-day in life without having to remember all the information that we need. On the other hand, however, this overload of information and all the resources that we have access to can lead to worse memory as a consequence.     I believe short-term memory is impacted so significantly and in a negative way because all the information the we have access to. The internet and all of its resources, such as Wikipedia, YouTube, research, databases, and guides mean that whether it's doing a job or learning new things in everyday life, you don't need to remember things as much because the information is always at your fingertips. Regarding s...
Read more

Intro to Cognitive Psychology Week 7

 Zach Tran Intro to Cognitive Psychology 10/22/23 My Own Memory      An example of procedural memory in my life is learning how to ski. Learning to ski was a very difficult process that took me many, many years to learn growing up, and I was lucky that my parents were persistent and kept me dedicated and constantly pushing myself. In this way, learning to ski is very similar to the common example for procedural memory of learning how to ride a bike, but also has many differences. Learning how to ride a bike is often described as something you never forget, which I think is a good description for procedural memory as a whole. And I agree, as even when I haven't ridden a bike in a long while, picking up a bike and trying to ride it again comes back instantly and easily. This is different to my experience with skiing. Usually I only ski in the winter season as it permits. Because skiing is so much more difficult, as shown as in my experience of taking years to learn it,...
Read more

Intro to Cognitive Psychology Week 3

Zach Tran Intro to Cognitive Psychology Week 3 Perception     An example in which I believe illusion was very imaginatively and powerfully used to alter one's senses of perception with the aim of deceiving them was in the movie Inception by director Christopher Nolan. In Inception , characters are able to control with great detail and power what takes place not only in their own dream but the dreams of others. The protagonists of the film build a team made up of specialists with the goal of constructing a dream that is so illusive and detailed that it fools their target's sense of perception and actually fools them into believing that their dream is real life.     The first sense of perception in which one is fooled in Inception  is visual perception. A member of the team focuses entirely on constructing a detailed world for the target. The world must be so detailed and realistic that the target believes they are actually in the real world and not a dream. In th...
Read more