Most of us think we’re accomplished multitaskers, confident managers of competing streams of information and entertainment.
But what are the limits of multitasking? And what kinds of distractions make us lose our focus on the task at hand? Those are the kinds of questions Katherine Moore, an assistant professor of psychology and director of the Attention, Memory and Cognition Lab, tries to answer in her research. Moore and one of her students, Elizabeth Wiemers, talked with us about their investigations into the costs of doing too many things at once.