Investigating the cognitive load - productivity tradeoff in multitasking

Although multitasking is considered solely to negatively impact performance, the majority of analyses of multitasking have been doing in experimental settings where the tasks analyzed are of a non-interdependent nature. I argue that multitasking as it occurs in the workforce is a highly complex task which balances multiple competing needs of logistical efficiency, cognitive load, and minimizaton of idle time. I examine this model of multitasking in the context of study 3 of the Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams (ASIST) program, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). Though the study was not designed with multitasking in mind and thus has a number of confounds, enough evidence exists to suggest a number of probable reasons for the persistence of multitasking in modern life and the multiple "task axes" on which multitasking can occur