Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Schalles, Matthew

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

The modern environment places constant demands on human attention, yet cognitive capacity remains fundamentally limited. This study investigated whether combining a visual memory task with a concurrent auditory vigilance task in the Psychology Experiment Building Language (PEBL) platform would function as a valid dual-task paradigm capable of producing measurable divided-attention costs. Thirty college students (ages 18–22, M = 20.47) completed three counterbalanced conditions: a memory automaticity task, an auditory vigilance task requiring spacebar responses to irregularly timed tones, and a dual-task condition combining both. Reaction time and accuracy served as dependent measures, analyzed using four paired-samples t-tests. Results revealed significant dual-task costs across three of four measures. Memory reaction time slowed substantially in the dual-task condition (M = 0.85s) compared to the single-task condition (M = 0.66s), t(29) = −4.88, p < .001. Auditory detection accuracy dropped from near-perfect (M = 1.00) to M = 0.93, t(29) = −5.50, p < .001, and auditory reaction time more than doubled from 0.38s to 0.83s, t(29) = 11.51, p < .001. Memory accuracy, however, remained stable across conditions (95% vs. 94%, p = .151), suggesting a speed–accuracy tradeoff in which participants preserved memory correctness at the cost of response efficiency. These findings indicate that the modified PEBL paradigm successfully produced genuine divided-attention interference rather than simple task co-occurrence, supporting its validity as a tool for studying dual-task performance.

Rights

The author has granted New College of Florida the nonexclusive right to archive, make accessible, and distribute for educational purposes this work in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The copyright of this work remains with the author.

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