Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Evidence exists that individuals prefer distinguishable strategies for self-organized task scheduling in multitasking. Theyeither prefer to work for long sequences on one task before switching to another (i.e., blocking), to switch repeatedly aftershort sequences (i.e., switching), or to process the current stimuli of two tasks before responding almost simultaneously(i.e., response grouping). We tested whether the strategies efficiency differs depending on the resource competition be-tween tasks in a free concurrent dual-tasking paradigm and whether individuals adapt their strategies accordingly. Ourresults show that switcher and response grouper are more efficient than blocker during low than high resource competitionbetween tasks. Comparably, more switchers shifted to a response grouping strategy than blockers towards a switchingstrategy. Overall, especially those individuals benefited from a lower resource competition, who already preferred a moreflexible approach in dealing with the multitasking demand during high resource competition.