Citation

Hoffmann JA, von Helversen B, Rieskamp J. Psychol. Sci. 2013; 24(6): 869-879.

Affiliation

University of Basel.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797612463581

PMID

23575598

Abstract

Multitasking poses a major challenge in modern work environments by putting the worker under cognitive load. Performance decrements often occur when people are under high cognitive load because they switch to less demanding-and often less accurate-cognitive strategies. Although cognitive load disturbs performance over a wide range of tasks, it may also carry benefits. In the experiments reported here, we showed that judgment performance can increase under cognitive load. Participants solved a multiple-cue judgment task in which high performance could be achieved by using a similarity-based judgment strategy but not by using a more demanding rule-based judgment strategy. Accordingly, cognitive load induced a shift to a similarity-based judgment strategy, which consequently led to more accurate judgments. By contrast, shifting to a similarity-based strategy harmed judgments in a task best solved by using a rule-based strategy. These results show how important it is to consider the cognitive strategies people rely on to understand how people perform in demanding work environments.

Language: en