APS Award Address

Human Multi-Tasking: Current Perspectives, Controversies, and Prospects in Psychological Science

David E. Meyer University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Multi-tasking has been of interest to psychological scientists since the days of William James, whose theorizing about attention helped spark a continuing investigation into the capacities and limitations of human information processing. By definition, people engage in 'multi-tasking' whenever they try to perform two or more tasks by making progress on all of them simultaneously or by switching rapidly back and forth between tasks. Major advances have been achieved during the past century in understanding the component mental processes and brain mechanisms whereby multi-tasking occurs under various conditions, revealing the structure of people’s 'cognitive architecture' and procedural task strategies. Yet fundamental controversies still prevail over how this architecture and these strategies really work in detail. The prevailing present state of affairs offers exciting prospects for future basic research in psychological science and for significant practical contributions to solving important problems raised by the world’s exponentially increasing, technologically driven multi-tasking mania.