Cerebral Cortex, Vol 8, 593-601, Copyright © 1998 by Oxford University Press
T Klingberg
When two tasks are performed simultaneously, performance often
deteriorates, with concomitant increases in reaction time and error rate.
Three potential neurophysiological mechanisms behind this deterioration in
performance have been considered here: (i) dual-task performance requires
additional cognitive operations and activation of cortical areas in
addition to those active during single-task performance; (ii) two tasks
interfere if they require activation of the same part of cortex; and (iii)
cross-modal inhibition causes interference between two tasks involving
stimuli from different sensory modalities. Positron emission tomography was
used to measure regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) during performance of
an auditory working memory (WM) task, a visual WM task, both WM tasks (dual
task) and a control condition. Compared to the control condition, the
auditory and visual WM tasks activated sensory-specific areas in the
superior temporal gyrus and occipital pole respectively. Both WM tasks also
activated overlapping parts of cortex in the dorsolateral prefrontal,
inferior parietal and cingulate cortex. There was no separate cortical area
which was activated only in the dual task, and thus no area which could be
associated with any dual task specific cognitive process such as
task-coordination or divided attention. Decrease in rCBF in one WM task did
not overlap with the areas of rCBF increase in the other WM task. However,
an inhibitory mechanism could not be ruled out, since the rCBF increase in
sensory specific areas was smaller in the dual- task condition than in the
single-task conditions. The cortical activity underlying WM was to a large
extent organized in a non-sensory specific, or non-parallel, way, and the
results are consistent with the hypothesis that concurrent tasks interfere
with each other if they demand activation of the same part of cortex.
ARTICLES
Concurrent performance of two working memory tasks: potential mechanisms of interference
Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. torkel.klingberg@neuro.ki.se
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