ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a research conducted in the 1980s concerned with aging, divided attention, and dual-task performance. Theoretical development, as well as human factors applications, would be greatly enhanced if research on aging, divided attention, and multiple-task performance would become more standardized, particularly in providing more meticulous descriptions of subject characteristics, task characteristics, and the procedures used in data collection. The picture with regard to aging, divided attention, and dual-task performance is a complicated one, but it may be safe to say that in all but the simplest tasks, older adults perform less well under dual-task conditions than do young adults. The chapter provides evidence that older adults have more difficulty than young adults in dual-task performance, whether such performance requires the dividing of attention over multiple-sense modalities or across separate cognitive processes.
