Task Switching: A Research Study
According to this article, task switching is important in one’s daily life, but it slowly declines as one ages. The authors study the age differences in voluntary task switching (VTS) procedure and manipulate the time to prepare a task selection and the repetition of the current task. The study included 33 young adults, ages 18-24, and 10 older adults, ages 61-88. A computer and a serial response box was used to present the stimuli and the participants’ responses. The stimuli included digits 1 – 4 and 6 – 9. Each digit was 6 – 8 mm, and was presented in a light gray background in a 14-point courier bold font. Stimulus repetitions occurred randomly. The participants were asked to practice each task, magnitude and parity, singly for 24 trials
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This training could be through the use of video games. This study uses the video game, Space Fortress (SF), with cognitive tasks components to support the hypothesis. SF was created as a tool for studying training strategies and learning, in which the players are required to focus attention on several overlapping tasks that represent real-world situations and tasks. This study includes both the continuous and discrete, the event-related, aspects of the game. The brain activity of the effects of playing SF were measured using an electroencephalogram (EEG) before and after the game. The event-related brain potential (ERP) and event-related spectral perturbations (ERSP) were two analyses used to analyze the brain activity associated with the discrete task events. This study involved 39 participants, who reported playing less than 3 hours of video games a week in the past 2 years, were right-handed, and had normal to corrected-to-normal vision. Before the experiment, the participants watched two short movies that explained the details and the most important rules of the game. After the movies, the participants were asked to familiarize themselves with SF, and then had a pre-training EEG session. Participants were to practice the game for 20 hours and return for their post-training EEG session. During the EEG training sessions, participants were to perform auditory oddball task without the game, and then to perform the auditory oddball task with the then 3-minutes-long games. The participants were asked to silently count the high tones and report the total at the end of each
This training could be through the use of video games. This study uses the video game, Space Fortress (SF), with cognitive tasks components to support the hypothesis. SF was created as a tool for studying training strategies and learning, in which the players are required to focus attention on several overlapping tasks that represent real-world situations and tasks. This study includes both the continuous and discrete, the event-related, aspects of the game. The brain activity of the effects of playing SF were measured using an electroencephalogram (EEG) before and after the game. The event-related brain potential (ERP) and event-related spectral perturbations (ERSP) were two analyses used to analyze the brain activity associated with the discrete task events. This study involved 39 participants, who reported playing less than 3 hours of video games a week in the past 2 years, were right-handed, and had normal to corrected-to-normal vision. Before the experiment, the participants watched two short movies that explained the details and the most important rules of the game. After the movies, the participants were asked to familiarize themselves with SF, and then had a pre-training EEG session. Participants were to practice the game for 20 hours and return for their post-training EEG session. During the EEG training sessions, participants were to perform auditory oddball task without the game, and then to perform the auditory oddball task with the then 3-minutes-long games. The participants were asked to silently count the high tones and report the total at the end of each