Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The sense of control (SoC) is the subjective feeling of being in control over an action, influenced by controllability, difficulty and feedback. However, it remains unclear how SoC is formed in multitasking scenarios. We conducted a study to analyze SoC and its impact on task-switching behavior in multitasking scenarios. Participants were required to perform two tasks in parallel while in control of one task at a time, requiring voluntary switching. We found that task-specific SoCs are influenced by the controllability and difficulty of each task. An overall SoC can be explained mainly by these task-specific SoCs. But, the overall SoC did not correlate with the frequency of task switches or the relative time spent on one task. Our analysis indicates that the SoC of a more control-demanding task has greater impact on the overall SoC and even affects the task-specific SoC of the other task, as well as task-switching behavior.