Dual-tasking: Is manual tapping independent of concurrently executed saccades?

Maintaining both spatial and temporal accuracy of concurrent motor actions is a challenging behavioral requirement in multi-tasking, where possible resource bottlenecks may become apparent when these units are shared between tasks. This study addresses the question of whether periodic self-paced finger movements (tapping) compulsorily interact with concurrently executed saccades, because they share some common neural control pathways. We employed a dual-task paradigm which was previously used to demonstrate strong interference between independent but concurrently conducted bimanual tapping tasks (Wachter, C.

Attention and feature integration in the feature inheritance effect.

Features of neighboring elements are not processed independently. Often, it is assumed that nearby features are integrated by a (pre-attentive) pooling mechanism. Here, we show that in the feature inheritance effect some features are integrated across space whereas others are not.