Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One of the most fundamental and striking limitations of hu-man cognitive function is the constraint on the number ofcontrol-dependent processes that can be executed simultane-ously. However, the sources of this capacity constraint re-main largely unexplored. Previous work has attributed the con-straints on control-dependent processing to the sharing of rep-resentations between tasks in neural systems. Here, we exam-ine how shared representations interact with two other factorsin producing constraints on control-dependent processing. Wefirst demonstrate that the detrimental effects of shared repre-sentations on multitasking performance are contingent on theamount of conflict that is induced by the tasks that share rep-resentations. We then examine how the persistence of sharedrepresentations between tasks affects processing interferenceduring serial task execution. Finally, we discuss how this set ofmechanisms can account for various phenomena in neural ar-chitectures, including the psychological refractory period, taskswitch costs, as well as constraints on cognitive control.