Effect of Divided Attention on Task Performance: An Experimental Study

Description

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23491698

Manas Barve and Shruti Karlekar (Department of Psychology, Sir Parshurambhau College, Pune, Maharashtra)

Divided attention refers to the ability to engage in two or more tasks at the same time or to focus on more than one stimulus at a time. It is one of the psychological processes that enable individuals to carry out several tasks at the same time. The current experimental study was performed to establish the relationship between divided attention and tasks performance and ascertain whether gender has an influence on divided attention ability. The research was carried out among 101 participants including 71 females and 30 males. The study followed the within-group design where the participants took part in Condition 1 (without divided attention) and condition 2 (with divided attention). The analysis revealed that there was a significant difference in the performance of tasks in condition 1 and condition 2. There is a significant result for the proposed research question, which was evident through the p-value of less than .001. Additionally, there was no significant main effect of gender (p = .498), nor a significant interaction between divided attention and gender (p = .356). The mean score of condition 1 was 4.62 while that of condition 2 was 1.59. This result can be used to conclude that participants who did not engage in divided attention tasks had a better performance than those who engaged in divided attention tasks. It can also be noted from the results that gender had no significant influence on the capacity of participants to engage in divided attention tasks.