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Task Switching and Visual Discrimination in Pedestrian Mobile Multitasking: Influence of IT Mobile Task Type

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Information Systems and Neuroscience

Abstract

With the growing use of smartphones in our daily life, mobile multitasking has become a widespread (and often dangerous) behavior. Research on mobile multitasking thus far only focuses on a limited number of IT tasks that can be performed with a smartphone: talking, listening to music, and texting. Thus, we do not know the extent to which these results generalize to other types of mobile multitasking behaviors such as reading while walking and gaming while walking. Also, we do not know the extent to which motor movement through physical space (i.e., walking vs. only standing) affects this phenomena. The current paper reports on an ongoing research that explores these questions. Our preliminary results suggest that mobile and standing multitasking leads to the inability to perceive incoming stimuli. Gaming appears to be the most dangerous mobile multitasking task for pedestrians.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In order to keep the number of conditions at a manageable level, two tasks which exhibited the smallest levels of dual task interference in Phase 1 (Tasks A and B) were excluded from Phase 2.

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Correspondence to Pierre-Majorique Léger .

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Léger, PM. et al. (2020). Task Switching and Visual Discrimination in Pedestrian Mobile Multitasking: Influence of IT Mobile Task Type. In: Davis, F., Riedl, R., vom Brocke, J., Léger, PM., Randolph, A., Fischer, T. (eds) Information Systems and Neuroscience. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28144-1_27

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