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As cognitive architectures continue to move forward toward more truly “unified theories of cognition,” integration has played and will continue to play a key role in their development. At least two distinct types of integration, known as integration by composition and integration by generalization, have become evident in recent work on cognitive architecture. This chapter discusses three examples of integration within this work on driver behavior: integration by composition of a lower-level control model into a production-system model for highway driving, integration by composition of the driver model with models of in-vehicle secondary tasks to predict driver distraction, and integration by generalization of the multitasking aspects of the previous models into a general executive for handling multitask performance. This integration has facilitated the development of practical systems that use these theories in real-world applications, such as predicting the distraction potential of novel in-vehicle devices.

Routines may be seen as something that induces lack of initiative and flexibility. This chapter focuses on various routines that people tend to follow in their day-to-day life. It opens with a discussion of Harold Crick and the monotonous routine that he used to follow for almost twelve years. Mechanical habits such as those that snared Harold make life shallow. Their reliability becomes a problem rather than a resource. Routines are not only survival techniques or perfunctory patterns; as has been shown by more recent scholarly approaches, they also constitute a cultural field full of tensions. Another issue is how their repetitious nature often hides important changes that eventually may transform them into something else. This chapter brings to attention various situations wherein one follows a specific routine. Ethnographies of makeup teach us much about how routines are made and transformed, depending on context. The coming together of a couple is one of those situations where routines all of a sudden become visible arenas of social and cultural conflicts. Later, this chapter draws attention to the multitasking of things that people try to follow to decrease certain overloads in daily life. It also claims that multitasking is a skill that must be acquired, and once learned it is often invisible, it just comes naturally.

Beyond the effects that contemporary media may be having upon our language, we need to think about whether computers and mobile phones are impacting the social fabric as well. Since the early days of mainframes, many people have feared that computers are undermining our sense of community. These concerns proliferated with the explosive growth of computer-mediated communication such as email. The good news is that most contemporary studies examining the social effects of Internet use indicate we have more cause for relief than concern. Increasingly, more and more people are “always on” one technology or another, whether for communicating, doing work, or relaxing by surfing the web or playing games. Regardless of the purpose, the fact that people are always on means that they need either to drop some other activity or switch to multitasking mode. This book has examined what kind of people we become — as individuals and as family members or friends — if our thoughts and our social relationships must increasingly compete for our attention with digital media.

This chapter discusses how language technology is used to control the volume of interpersonal communication. It examines a range of language technologies that have increasingly empowered individuals to call the shots on social interaction. The more conceptual discussion is illustrated with data from a study undertaken in fall 2004 and spring 2005 of multitasking behavior by college students while using instant messaging. The study reveals how deft the current generation of multitaskers is at meshing online conversations with other activities. In electronically-mediated communication, users turn up the “volume” when they incessantly check their email. Along with the volume-control metaphor, another useful concept is affordances, the physical properties of objects that enable us to use them in particular ways. This chapter also looks at discourse control in traditional face-to-face and written-communication settings, and then at the affordances new language technologies add for adjusting the conversational “volume”. The cognitive and social aspects of multitasking, specifically with respect to instant messaging and mobile phones, are also discussed.

One of the great successes of functional neuroimaging as a method has been to generate theories concerning the cognitive functions supported by rostral PFC (approximating Brodmann Area 10). But these ideas have developed largely without regard to the existing data available from human lesion studies, which should have provided valuable constraints on theorising. These data are outlined here, augmented by a meta-analysis of the work of Donald T. Stuss and colleagues. Rostral PFC lesions do not typically cause widespread cognitive deficits. But they often do cause marked deficits in a range of cognitive abilities which have hitherto received little attention from cognitive scientists. These include (but are not restricted to) prospective memory, multitasking, “metacognitive” control, and social behaviour. It is argued that functional neuroimaging practitioners of functional neuroimaging might wish to consider these data when interpreting, post-hoc, findings of haemodynamic change in rostral PFC.

This chapter focuses on understanding multitasking with information and communication technologies (ICTs) in respect to interpersonal communication management, and also presents ICTs’ contribution to controlling conversations in fixed and mobile technologies. The introduction of voice mails, caller ID, and facilities to block calls from specific numbers are a few examples of the contribution of ICTs in helping subscribers or users to control their conversations. The chapter discusses e-mails and instant messaging (IM) as services that provide opportunities for recipients to avoid or manipulate messages from the sender. It presents reasons for multitasking along with comparing cognitive and social multitasking. Performance changes while practicing cognitive and social multitasking with ICTs are presented along with American college students’ multitasking patterns, the importance of social multitasking, and acceptable and unacceptable behaviors of the preceding.

The rostral prefrontal cortex (or Area 10) is a sizeable brain region that is especially large in humans compared with other animals, yet very little is known about what role it plays in cognition. This chapter contains three sections. The first reviews the existing empirical and theoretical evidence. The second presents a new theoretical account of its function that synthesises this evidence. The third section describes a recent series of experiments that demonstrate the plausibility of the theory. Rostral prefrontal cortex (rostral PFC) is identified as subserving a system that biases the relative influence of stimulus-oriented and stimulus-independent thought. This cognitive control function is used in a wide range of situations critical to competent human behaviour in everyday life, ranging from straightforward ‘watchfulness’ to complex activities such as remembering to carry out intended actions after a delay, multitasking, and aspects of recollection.

While often being reminded to pay full attention while driving an automobile, people regularly engage in a wide variety of multitasking activities when they are behind the wheel. Unfortunately, these multitasking activities often result in driver distraction. During the last decade, many new electronic devices were developed and are making their way into the vehicle. There is good reason to believe that some of these new multitasking activities may be more distracting because they are more cognitively engaging and because they are often performed over more sustained periods of time. This chapter examines the human information processing costs associated with hands-free cell phone use during driving. The benchmark used is that of the driver who is intoxicated from ethanol at the legal limit (0.08 wt/vol). How do the impairments caused by cell phone conversations compare with this benchmark? The conclusions of the study, in terms of the nature and magnitude of performance and safety costs, are both theoretically and practically important, and suggest that recent registration on cell phones and driving should be reexamined in light of the data.

Drawing from a study of 120 television viewers who had binge-watched at least two shows in the previous 12 months, this study presents a picture of a viewer who weaves binge-watching into their domestic experience. Many participants were viewing at night through television screens or more mobile screens (such as laptops and tablets) to move the binge-watch out of the living room--most commonly into the bedroom. The two-show comparison suggests that binge-watching behaviors such as co-viewing and multitasking were situational rather than ritualistic. Media multitasking involved several different activities, either related to screens (gaming, texting, perusing social media, working on a computer) or unrelated to screens (eating, knitting, drawing). Although multitasking may diminish the quality of the two coinciding activities, participants reported many multitasking gratifications or benefits, including productivity, alleviating boredom, and relaxation enhancement. These findings gesture toward a view of binge-watching that maximizes an entertainment experience in a way that complements rather than replaces other daily activities and rituals.

This chapter presents the latest scientific research on the role of social media in teens' lives. Never before have the youth had so many opportunities to bring their self-presentation to perfection. They can, for example, endlessly edit their digital profiles and selfies before they post them on the Web or send them to friends. Does this ability make them more self-aware? Or does it turn them into narcissists? Does the use of social media lead to superficial relationships and loneliness—or does it boost self-esteem and social skills? What effects does extensive media multitasking have on youth? Does it make them lose their ability to concentrate and contemplate?

The chapter generalizes the condition on wh-questions introduced in chapter 3 to relations between Probes and Goals more generally. Generalizing a result from the previous chapter, it is shown that in a given language, depending on the position of prosodic phenomena in the prosodic phrases of that language, Probes must be adjacent either to preceding Goals or to following Goals. A number of adjacency effects follow: English verbs and objects, Irish verbs and subjects, English and Danish T moved to C and subjects, for example. Instances of derivational opacity demonstrate that Contiguity for one probe need not be respected by another probe affecting the same Goal; it is argued that Contiguity relations are ‘forgotten’ at the phase level. A condition of Multitasking, which requires a head to satisfy its requirements with as few operations as possible, is introduced: it is used to account for the fact that V2 languages generally have overt wh-movement, and for the fact that EPP in SOV languages like Japanese, unlike in English, may be satisfied with any phrase (and hence, SOV languages generally have scrambling).

The overall theory is reviewed. Movement during the narrow-syntactic derivation is driven by two major conditions: Affix Support and Generalized Contiguity. The last two chapters have uncovered a number of operations that apply at Spell-out, as the grammar attempts to improve the representation before handing it off to PF: these include the lowering of affixes to suitable hosts, the fixing of word order made indeterminate by Untethering, and deletion of material which blocks the initial formation of Selectional Contiguity relations. The computation’s choice of operations is guided by conditions like Multitasking (which requires the grammar to perform operations that satisfy as many constraints as possible) and Hippocratic Altruism (which prevents elements from participating in an operation if the operation’s only effect on them will be to destroy Contiguity relations in which they participate).

This chapter discusses some dataset shift learning problems from a formal, statistical point of view. It provides definitions for “multitask learning,” “inductive transfer,” and “domain adaptation,” and discusses the parameters along which such learning scenarios may be taxonomized. The chapter then focuses on one concrete setting of domain adaptation and demonstrates how error bounds can be derived for it. These bounds can be reliably estimated from finite samples of training data, and do not rely on any assumptions concerning similarity between the domain from which the labeled training data is sampled and the target (or test) data. However, they are relative to the performance of some optimal classifier, rather than providing any absolute performance guarantee.

Blair’s first conference as Leader in 1994 had been less of a voting triumph than the skilful spin suggested. In 1995, multitasking of managerial organisation, conducted like a military operation, began the attempt to secure total control. This chapter examines a range of motivations and mechanisms of management which covered intensively every aspect of influence over the conference policymaking process. Management is scrutinised in the light of changes in conference voting weight, the variable adherence to the new process of Partnership in Power and the changing responses, and unanticipated consequences that these produced. Management relations with the unions remained a corner-stone of stability but by 2000 began to be undermined as a result of growing distrust of management behaviour following the pensions revolt.

When mobile devices entered organizational meetings, there was a flurry of responses that sometimes resulted in misunderstandings. Olivia is a manager who’s trying to adapt to her vice president’s strict rule of “no thumbs under the table.” But her direct boss keeps bugging her while she’s in other meetings. Cedric is a mid-level manager in a global advertising firm who is confident his constant BlackBerry use conveys how productive he is; but the president thinks mobile use in his meetings hinders listening. Four key findings emerge: (1) some managers establish meeting ground rules, while others are not so clear; (2) subordinates using their mobiles in meetings are often oblivious as to how they’re being judged; (3) people often multicommunicate in meetings to essentially be two places at once; and (4) concertive control puts a normative pressure on groups that practically forces them to agree to be always reachable.

When users interact with computers and technology ‘in the wild’, multitasking is a practically ubiquitous part of their interactions. Human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers and practitioners have increasingly used computational models to better understand these multitasking behaviours and to build new interactive technologies that facilitate interaction and/or mitigate the problems that arise from multitasking and distraction. This chapter outlines three approaches for modelling: cognitive architectures, cognitive constraint modelling, and uncertainty modelling. These approaches are some of the most common and powerful approaches to computational models of user multitasking, and have complementary strengths. It draws on examples from several domains for which multitasking is a central component, giving a particular focus to in-car multitasking and driver distraction.

In this chapter, psychological theories of visual perception and attention are considered in relation to journalism. First, the chapter discusses so-called limited capacity processing—that is, humans are limited in the amount of information they can process at any one time. Next, journalists’ use of visual images is discussed. Although a picture ‘may be worth a thousand words’ (or more), journalists also need to take account of so-called ‘wishful seeing’—that people may see only what they want to see. The chapter then considers the phenomenon of ‘priming’ in relation to the way in which a story is framed, which may trigger particular concepts or stereotypes (positive or negative). Finally, the chapter considers emotional processing within journalism—how an individual’s emotional state may impact on their perceptions of a story, and how journalists may utilize emotion to influence audience engagement and comprehension.

This chapter considers how girls and boys view the conflict between media consumption and learning in class, focusing on uses of portable media in classroom that take place mostly in secret in the classroom. It compares listening practices in school and at home to bring the institutional structure of kids’ listening practices into relief, and it compares kids uses of portable video gamed devices with MP3 players to explore the gendering of kids’ media consumption. The contrast between discourses of “multitasking” that are volunteered differently by boys and girls suggest that each group sees the fine-grained details of their media interactions as deeply tied up in their social identities in school.

Popular culture has promoted a myth about why shot durations in movies have grown shorter during the past 50 years. The myth states that this is due to culturally shortened attention spans. There is no evidence for this urban legend. What there is strong evidence for, however, is people’s increased ability to extract visual information from displays of all kinds. IQs have increased throughout the world for at least a century, and the greatest increases have occurred for visual thinking and reasoning. This is called the Flynn effect. If people can discern images faster, filmmakers should have shortened shots. Moreover, the cultural adaptation to watching edited video invokes a concept from Michael Baxandall—the period eye. Imported to movies, viewers today are better able to see and discern visual information compared with viewers of a previous era. Examples are discussed from computer graphics.

Awards directly and succinctly cater to one of the major human desires, namely, to be recognized and appreciated. Awards can raise recipients’ intrinsic motivation, make them more creative, and induce them to identify with the task. Awards establish a bond of loyalty to the giver. Monetary incentives, in particular pay-for-performance, may be applied to simple tasks. With more complex tasks, monetary incentives risk leading to multitasking and manipulation of the performance measurement and criteria. There is a lack of comprehensive and reliable data. Open issues include, but are not limited to, the question of who does and who does not get awards, why some organizations refrain from handing out awards, and what effects different types of awards have under varying conditions.