DIVIDED ATTENTION - STORING AND CLASSIFYING BRIEFLY PRESENTED OBJECTS

Although in many studies divided attention has been examined by having people perform the same task (e.g., report or search) with a large nu mber of objects, in few studies have people had to perform two logical ly independent tasks involving the same brief display. In two experime nts, subjects saw 200-msec arrays of characters. In dual-task blocks, they classified the color of some or all of the items (making an immed iate response) and stored the shape of some of the items for a later r ecognition test. There was not much mutual interference between classi fying and storing per se. However, the tasks were by no means independ ent: there was substantial interference when different objects from th e array had to be stored for one task and classified for the other. Th e results confirm that wholly unrelated visual tasks depend on the sam e input-attention system and suggest that attending to an object for a ny purpose may entail storing a representation of it in visual short-t erm memory.