Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When individuals attempt to complete multiple tasks simultaneously, constraints on how attention is deployed influence performance. However, experimental findings from dual-tasking paradigms often rely on analysis of aggregated data that obscure study of how the carryover or spillover of attention over time – attentional inertia and residue – changes within person and over time. This study introduces an analytical framework for examining if and how attentional control settings from an initial task persist both within the same task (attentional inertia) and between two different tasks (attentional residue) across trial, session, and person levels. Leveraging reaction time data from 58 participants who completed 20 online sessions of dual-task performance blocks, we employed multilevel vector autoregression models to simultaneously model the lagged and cross-lagged effects. Our results demonstrate that both positive inertia and positive residue effects manifest and that they are positively correlated, especially for those originating from the same initial task.