Traces of fatigue in an attention dual task: II

Effects of physical effort have been difficult to trace in attention tasks for various reasons, such as the activating effect of the laboratory situation or the spare capacity in automated tasks. Instead, Vervaeck, Deboeck, Hueting, and Soetens (1982) proposed a dual task, reflecting quantitatively the changes that take place in the processing of information when fatigue is introduced. This is a follow-up paper with a similar method; that is, a visual-auditory dual task is presented 30 min after physical effort. The results revealed that the deterioration of performance in the more difficult part of the visual component of the task, found in the previous study, was not due to an increased distraction of fatigued subjects, but rather to a shortage of allocatable capacity. It is suggested that parallel processing occurs with one fast processing line, which is used for evaluating the requirements of the task. Combining this information with an estimation of the available allocatable capacity, subjects decide to continue or to interrupt the processing of the stimulus. © 1984, The Psychonomic Society, Inc. All rights reserved.SCOPUS: ar.j