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Potts CA, Rosenbaum DA. Does attention solve the "apples-and-oranges" problems of judging task difficulty and task order?. Psychol Res. 2021;85(8):3040-3047doi: 10.1007/s00426-020-01453-7.
Potts, C. A., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (2021). Does attention solve the "apples-and-oranges" problems of judging task difficulty and task order?. Psychological research, 85(8), 3040-3047. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01453-7
Potts, Cory A, and Rosenbaum, David A. "Does attention solve the "apples-and-oranges" problems of judging task difficulty and task order?." Psychological research vol. 85,8 (2021): 3040-3047. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01453-7
Potts CA, Rosenbaum DA. Does attention solve the "apples-and-oranges" problems of judging task difficulty and task order?. Psychol Res. 2021 Nov;85(8):3040-3047. doi: 10.1007/s00426-020-01453-7. Epub 2021 Jan 03. PMID: 33389043.
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Psychol Res. 2021 Nov;85(8):3040-3047. doi: 10.1007/s00426-020-01453-7. Epub 2021 Jan 03.

Does attention solve the "apples-and-oranges" problems of judging task difficulty and task order?.

Psychological research

Cory A Potts, David A Rosenbaum

Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA. [email protected].
  2. Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, 95251, USA.

PMID: 33389043 DOI: 10.1007/s00426-020-01453-7

Abstract

How do we compare the difficulty of different kinds of tasks, and how we do sequence tasks of different kinds when the basis for the ordering is the tasks' difficulty levels? The ability to do these things requires a common currency, but the identity of that currency, if it exists, is unknown. We hypothesized that people may believe that the time that attention is paid to tasks enables people to compare and sequence tasks of different kinds. To evaluate this hypothesis, we tested three groups of participants. One group estimated the proportion of time that performance of a task requires attention-what we called attention time proportions or ATPs. We obtained ATPs for tasks that were "more intellectual" (counting) and others that were "more physical" (locomotion). Two additional groups made 2-alternative-forced-choice decisions about the relative ease and preferred sequencing of all possible pairs of tasks for which ATPs were independently obtained. We found that ATPs predicted judgments of task difficulty and preferred task order.

© 2021. Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

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