Compensatory Strategies for Managing the Workload Demands of a Multimodal Reserve Capacity Task

The purpose of the present study was to use a newly-developed measure of reserve attentional capacity to evaluate unitary versus multiple resource theories of attention. Participants performed a primary visual monitoring task and were presented with visual, auditory, and tactile secondary loading tasks. The data indicate that participants failed to maintain performance on the primary task, as instructed, in order to maximize overall performance. A significant difference was found on the basis of primary task condition, wherein performance on the visual monitoring task was significantly worse when paired with a visual task versus auditory or tactile tasks. Although the data do not preclude interpretation in terms of a unitary resource model, data trends offer potential support for multiple resource models.