Psychology Seminar: Timothy J. Ricker (University of South Dakota)
Theories of why dual-tasking impairs working memory, the information that is immediately accessible for ongoing cognition, have remained fundamentally static for 20+ years. Yet we are still far from a comprehensive understanding of when we should and when we should not see dual-task impairment. In this talk, I will explain the two major theoretical perspectives and some of my own experimental work demonstrating some fundamental problems for the major theories. This work demonstrates that although the major theoretical perspectives can explain many of the major patterns we observe, they miss major performance loss across a variety of conditions and their explanations are inconsistent and self-contradictory across contexts. Instead, I propose an alternative explanation, that dual-tasking does not lead to forgetting, but rather impoverished memory creation.