Multitasking Easy Only When Stimuli Type Differ

A study to be published in the October issue of Psychological Science shows that the human brain is quite capable of conducting two tasks at the same time--for example talking while driving--so long as the tasks were of distinct types of perceptual stimuli.

Participants in the study experienced little difficulty learning complex structures streamed at them simultaneously, such as tones and colors or even tones and speech.

"However, performance dropped when the two sets of sequences were from the same perceptual class of stimuli, such as two sets of speech stimuli," said [co-author Christopher Conway]. "Overall, these results show that humans have a powerful learning system that is capable of learning sequential patterns simultaneously from multiple environmental sources --- provided each source is perceived as being distinct.

Read more: Double Talk Overwhelms Us, But Multitasking Is No Problem