Physiological and psychological evaluation of distraction stress. Paper presented at the 2nd I.E.A. Congress, Dortmund, 1964.

The dual task method used in early psychological experiments to study attention problems was reintroduced by Bornemann (1942) during the war to measure the mental demands involved in the performance of a job. A secondary task served to absorb the mental capacity which was not used by the main task. The first task can thus be regarded as a stress condition in the performance of a secondary task. Therefore this way of applying the dual task method was called distraction stress (Kalsbeek 1964 a). In the following experiments only this method is used.