Most people can rather efficiently walk and chew gum at the same time, but when it comes to more complicated "multi-tasking" – like driving and talking on a cell phone – there is a price to pay.
And no one, it seems, is immune.
"There is a cost for switching from one task to another and that cost can be in response time or in accuracy," said
Mei-Ching Lien, an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University. "Even with a seemingly simple task, structural cognitive limitations can prevent you from efficiently switching to a new task."
Psychologists who study multi-tasking have argued for years about whether these "information bottlenecks" occur because people are inherently lazy, or because they have a fundamental inability to switch from one task to another. New studies by Lien and her colleagues at the NASA Ames Research Center in California suggest it is the latter.
Results of their study have been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.