ABSTRACT
Prabu David, Michigan State University
Despite the widespread attention that multitasking has received from communication researchers, a unified framework has not emerged. The purpose of this chapter is to offer threaded cognition (Salvucci & Taatgen, 2008) as a theoretical framework to examine POPC multitasking. The proposed framework is well suited for studying and modeling multitasking behaviors that occupy our lives. Threaded cognition is based on the central idea that multiple goals can be maintained in cognition and each goal can be operationalized as an autonomous thread with its own cognitive, perceptual, and motor resources. By combining bottlenecks in cognition that force serial processing and allow for parallel processing through multiple resources, threaded cognition approximates both task switching and multitasking, two distinct behaviors that are interwoven in POPC multitasking. Extensions to threaded cognition are discussed with an emphasis on loose and emergent goals that are the norm for POPC activities.
