Divided Attention

Divided attention is the attempt to allocate attention to more than one source of information or task at the same time, commonly called multitasking in everyday language. Research consistently finds that people make more errors and work more slowly when dividing attention across simultaneous tasks than when focusing on one task at a time. Early studies examined the limits of divided attention in controlled settings, such as reading while listening to something else, or listening to two different spoken messages at once. Later research moved into applied settings such as driving while talking on a phone or tuning a radio; these studies find that driving performance measurably worsens under divided attention, with more errors, harder and later braking, lane drift, and reduced awareness of surroundings, and that hands free and hand held phone conversations impair driving to a similar degree, which points to a cognitive rather than a manual limitation. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/