Editorial: Multitasking: Executive Functioning in Dual-Task and Task Switching Situations

Persons are often engaged in activities that combine multiple tasks (so called multitasking), even though this combination is typically accompanied by performance costs in the individual tasks in comparison to their performance as single tasks. Such performance costs suggest that performing multiple tasks brings the cognitive processing system to its limits. However, the observed limitations can inform theories of how cognitive processing is generally organized. In other words, investigations on the limitations of multitasking performance can reveal fundamental aspects of the cognitive processing architecture andmechanisms of human information processing. These aspects have been investigated with a variety of experimental paradigms typically comprising two different component tasks that vary in the degree of temporal overlap. While it is difficult to define with precision what constitutes a “task” (Rogers and Monsell, 1995; Monsell, 2003; Kiesel et al., 2010), one can define “task” broadly, so that (i) simple stimulus-response (S-R) translations [e.g., press a response key when hearing a low tone in so-called choice reaction time (RT) tasks], (ii) continuous tasks like motor tracking, (iii) complex movements (e.g., type writing), or (iv) tasks without necessarily yielding overt behavior (e.g., counting) can constitute a task if a person aims to achieve a discriminable goal state. Irrespective of the specific type of task, multitasking research includes research on dual-task performance and task switching performance (Pashler, 2000). While dual-task performance requires concurrent and simultaneous task processing and motor responses, task switching focuses on multitasking with sequentially processed component tasks.