Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research has shown that when people multitask, boththe subtask structure and the temporal constraints of thecomponent tasks strongly influence people’s task-switchingbehavior. In this paper, we propose an integrated theoreticalaccount and associated computational model that aims toquantify how people balance structural and temporalconstraints in everyday multitasking. We validate the theoryusing data from an empirical study in which drivers performeda visual-search task while navigating a driving environment.Through examination of illustrative protocols from the modeland human drivers as well as the overall fit on the aggregateglance data, we explore the implications of the theory andmodel for time-critical multitasking domains.