Theory suggests that driving should be impaired for all motorists when they concurrently talk on a cell phone. But is everybody impaired by this dual-task combination? The authors tested 200 participants in a high-fidelity driving simulator in both single- and dual-task conditions. The dual-task involved driving while concurrently performing a demanding auditory version of the operation span (OSPAN) task. Whereas the vast majority of participants showed significant performance decrements in dual task conditions (compared to single-task conditions for both driving and OSPAN tasks), 2.5% of the sample showed absolutely no performance decrements when comparing single- and dual-tasks. In single-task conditions, these “supertaskers” scored in the top quartile on all dependent measures associated with driving and OSPAN tasks, and Monte Carlo simulations indicated that the frequency of supertaskers was significantly greater than chance. These individual differences help to sharpen our theoretical understanding of attention and cognitive control in naturalistic settings. (Author/publisher)
Abstract