Introduction: The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is highly susceptible to age-related deterioration. As such, executive function deficits are commonly observed when older adults process two attention-demanding tasks simultaneously. Everyday tasks such as walking and talking on the phone involve executive functions and the integration of cognitive-motor pathways. However, less is known about this relationship as cognitive demands increase. Methods: Twenty healthy older adults (M = 71.8 years, SD = 6.4) performed four auditory cognitive tasks of increasing demand, including a simple reaction time (SRT), go/no-go (GNG), n-back (NBK), and double number sequence (DNS) task with or without self-paced walking (i.e., single- versus dual-task). Using a blocked design, prefrontal hemodynamic changes (i.e., oxy- [∆HbO2] and deoxyhemoglobin [∆HbR]) were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and performance was assessed using measures of response time (s), accuracy (% correct) and gait speed (m/s). Results: Prefrontal activation decreased between the single- and dual-tasks across all task demands. Behaviourally, the SRT response times were significantly faster than GNG and NBK. Accuracy decreased between single- and dual-tasks and with increasing demand, but the NBK and DNS tasks were not significantly different. An interaction between task and demand was observed for gait speed such that the DNS dual-task was significantly slower than the single-task. Conclusion: Neural findings support an automatic locomotor control strategy in that cerebral oxygenation decreased between single- and dual-tasks and gait speed was maintained up until the most demanding cognitive task. However, decreased prefrontal activation was inefficient at supporting response time and accuracy performance which may indicate that cognitive performance is differentially affected by cognitive demand and deficits in executive functioning.

BACKGROUND: Age-related deterioration in the nervous system results in the decline of motor and cognitive abilities, which both have been identified as contributing to fall risk in older adults. Dual-task gait, which involves walking while performing a secondary cognitive task, is a common way to assess the interactions between cognitive and motor function. Previous work has established associations between the cost of the cognitive load on gait parameters (e.g., velocity) and fall risk in older adults. However, to date, no study has explored the potential value of combining a direct measure of performance on the cognitive component of the dual-task with the gait measures in fall risk prediction modeling. RESEARCH QUESTIONS: Does including measures of performance on the cognitive task in dual-task walking with the gait velocity measures enhance the capacity to predict fall risk. Is this predictive capacity different in models employing dual-task gait velocity versus models including the cost of the cognitive load on gait velocity? METHODS: Thirty-two community-dwelling older adults (76 years ± 3.44) were classified as fallers (n = 17) and non-fallers (n = 15) based on self-report of having at least one fall in the past 12 months. They completed single-task and dual-task walking on a pressure-sensing electronic walkway system. A progressively enhanced series of logistic regression models were performed commencing with gait velocity during the dual-task (Loaded Gait Velocity, LGV) as the covariate in predicting fall risk. This model was subsequently augmented by adding a measure of cognitive performance covariate and then further augmented with the addition of the interaction variable between the LGV and the cognitive performance variables. This stepped series of modelling was then repeated with the dual-task cost gait velocity (DTCGV, difference in gait velocity between single and dual-task). RESULTS: With the addition of the cognitive measures (CM) and the interaction variables between the GV and CM variables, in both the LGV and DTC_GV models, the Nagelkerke’s R square increased as did the models’ respective sensitivity. Notably, the model including the LGV, CM and the interaction variables achieved 88.2% sensitivity, 80% specificity, with an overall classification accuracy of 84.4%. DISCUSSION: This study is the first to show that the ability to identify fallers and non-fallers is enhanced by using both gait and cognition measures as well as interaction variables between gait and cognition measures. Further, our findings suggest that the added value of the cognitive measures is best realized with LGV rather than DTCGV. It reasons that because DTC already encompasses the cost of the cognitive load on the motor performance (gait velocity), combining it with cognitive metrics does not enhance its predictive capacity. This work suggests there is clinical utility of including cognitive performance measures in fall risk modeling as well as it provides further evidence of the interplay between cognitive and motor function in fall risk. / Graduate

Threat perception is an important issue in today's world. As the line between hostile and non-hostile entities is blurred, it becomes more important for individuals to clearly distinguish between those who would present danger and those who would not. This series of experiments tested whether observers engaged in a dual-task paradigm perceived a greater amount of threat from target stimuli than they did when they were engaged in the threat task alone. The first experiment revealed that observers rated targets as more threatening when they were engaged in the additional task than when they only rated the targets themselves. Response time to the targets was also slower when a secondary task was present. This difference was more pronounced when the secondary task was presented via the auditory channel. Participants also rated overall workload higher when performing a secondary task, with the highest ratings being associated with the dual-task auditory condition. In the second experiment, the design crossed sensory modality with the presence or non-presence of threat. Inter-stimulus interval was also manipulated. The presence of threat was associated with faster response times, though when both tasks had threat components, response time was not the fastest. Additionally, when images came first in the stimulus pairs, observers were slower to respond to the first stimulus than when the sounds were presented first. Results supported the conclusion that additional task loading can affect the perception of threat. The modality of the additional task seems to also play a role in threat assessment performance. Results also led to the conclusion that threat-related visual stimuli are more challenging to process than threat-related auditory stimuli. Future research can now investigate how different types of tasks affect the threat perception task. Implications for better training of soldiers and for the design of automated systems are presented.

The research objectives were (1) to perform a detailed review of the literature on speech recognition technology and the attentional demands of driving; (2) to develop decision tools that assist designers of in-vehicle systems; (3) to experimentally examine automatic speech recognition (ASR) design parameters, input modalities, and driver ages; and (4) to provide human factors recommendations for the use of speech recognition technology in automotive applications. Two experiments were conducted to determine the effects of ASR design parameters, input modality, and age on driving performance, system usability, and driver preference/acceptance. Eye movement behavior, steering input behavior, speed maintenance behavior, reaction time to forward scene event, task completion time, and task completion errors when driving and performing in-vehicle tasks were measured. Driver preference/acceptance subjective data were also recorded. The results showed that ASR design parameters significantly affected measures of driving performance, system usability, and driver preference/acceptance. However, from a practical viewpoint, ASR design parameters had a nominal effect on driving performance. Differences measured in driving performance brought on by changes in ASR system design parameters were small enough that alternative ASR system designs could be considered without impacting driving performance. No benefits could be claimed for ASR systems improving driving safety/performance compared to current manual-control systems. Speech recognition system design demonstrated a moderate influence on the usability of in-vehicle tasks. Criteria such as task completion times and task completion errors were shown to be different between speech-input and manual-input control methods, and under different ASR design configurations. Therefore, trade-offs between ASR system designs, and between speech-input and manual-input systems, could be evaluated in terms of usability. Finally, ASR system design had a nominal effect on driver preference/acceptance. Further research is warranted to determine if long-term use of ASR systems with less than optimal design parameters would result in significantly lower values for driver preference/acceptance compared to data collected in this research effort. Human factors recommendations for the use of ASR technology in automotive applications are included. The recommendations are based on the empirical research and the literature review on speech recognition technology and the attentional demands of driving. / Ph. D.

Workers are challenged by the increasingly complex multitasking environments they experience. To interact effectively with these environments, they must avoid overload. When workers get overloaded (when their mental demands exceed the resource capacity) quality drops, performance degrades, and safety suffers. What is largely unknown, however, is whether these results translate to postural tasks. Postural stability exhibits an entirely different set of challenges: injury, the danger of slips and falls, and risks associated with aging workers or those who have mental or physical challenges. An assembly line worker, for example, must assume different postures, interact with the product in some way, and react to visual and auditory alarms. Mistakes could be dangerous. It is clearly important, then, to understand the interactive effects of mental and postural workload. The goal of this research was to quantify the effects of mental and postural demands on overall workload. To accomplish this, we implemented three studies that were designed to capture the synergistic effects of different task types on overall workload and compare different types of workload measures against each other to help further design research in the area. We designed a dual-task mental/postural protocol to test the differential effects of a series of cognitive demands found in dual-task postural studied. The results of the first study depict a clear picture: the addition of an auditory task to unstable seating decreases postural sway. Based solely on this result, it might be concluded that workload did not increase. Using the same protocol while measuring mental workload however, we found that workload did in fact increase both subjectively and objectively, even when similar postural benefit was found. Even as performance seemed to improve, the participant moved nearer to possible overload and performance decrement (a condition we did not induce in this research). Based on the differences found between the different measures, we believe the importance of measuring overall workload as well as individual task performance in cognitive/postural dual-task research is very high. / Ph. D.

Previous naturalistic driving studies have shown that visual and manual secondary tasks increase driving crash risk. With the increasing use of infotainment systems in vehicles, secondary tasks requiring cognitive executive demand may increase crash risk, especially for young and older drivers. Naturalistic driving data were examined to determine if secondary tasks with increasing cognitive executive demand would result in increasing crash risk. Data were extracted from the Second Strategic Highway Research Program Naturalistic Driving Study, where vehicles were instrumented to record driving behavior and crash/near-crash data. Cognitive executive and visual-manual tasks paired with a second cognitive executive task were compared to the cognitive executive and visual-manual tasks performed alone. Crash/near-crash odds ratios were computed by comparing each task condition to driving without presence of any secondary task. Dual cognitive executive tasks resulted in greater odds ratios than those for single cognitive executive tasks. The dual visual-manual tasks odds ratios did not increase from single task odds ratios. These effects were only found for young drivers. These findings help validate that cognitive executive secondary task load increases crash/near-crash risk, especially in dual task situations for young drivers. Future research should be conducted to minimize cognitive task load associated with vehicle infotainment systems using such technologies as voice commands. / Master of Science / Previous naturalistic driving studies have shown that visual and manual secondary tasks increase driving crash risk. With the increasing use of infotainment systems in vehicles, secondary tasks requiring cognitive demand may increase crash risk, especially for young and older drivers. Naturalistic driving study data were examined to determine if secondary tasks with increasing proposed cognitive demand would result in increasing crash/near-crash risk. Cognitive and visual-manual tasks paired with a second cognitive task were compared to the cognitive and visual-manual tasks performed alone. It was found that dual cognitive tasks resulted in greater crash/near-crash risk than the single cognitive executive tasks. The dual visual-manual tasks did not show greater crash/near crash risk than the visual-manual tasks performed alone. These effects were only found for young drivers. These findings help validate that cognitive secondary task load increases crash/near-crash risk, especially in dual task situations for young drivers. Future infotainment systems and drivers' education programs should be designed to minimize cognitive loads.

abstract: INTRODUCTION: As people age, they become increasingly susceptible to falls, particularly when their attention is divided. Cognitive domains such as executive functioning and processing speed also decline over time and are associated with falls. A critical aspect to reducing falls are reactive steps, which are used to recover balance after a perturbation. Characterizing the relationship between cognition, dual tasking, and prioritization is necessary in order to decrease fall risk in older adults. Thus, the purpose of this analysis was to determine the effects of baseline cognitive status on dual task interference and prioritization of postural and cognitive tasks while reactive stepping. METHODS: 30 participants (Parkinson's disease (PD) n=16, healthy controls (HC) n=14) were divided into two groups based on their baseline cognitive status: the high-cog group (n=18) or the low-cog group (n=12). All participants experienced 7 perturbation trials where they were solely tasked with reactive stepping, 2 cognitive trials where they were solely tasked with verbally responding to an auditory Stroop test, and 7 trials that combined the two tasks. Cognitive and protective stepping performance was calculated for dual task interference and prioritization across groups. RESULTS: There were no outcome variables that showed the log-cog group performing worse than the high-cog group from single to dual task conditions. While examining the dual task interference between groups, the only significant outcome was that the low-cog group exhibited a subtle improvement in their step length performance under dual task conditions while the high-cog group did not. When comparing the prioritization scores, there was no statistically significant difference in prioritization between the high-cog and low-cog group. Albeit not significant across groups, the prioritization score for all outcomes was negative, indicating a stepping prioritization under dual task conditions for both groups. This analysis provides preliminary evidence that baseline cognitive status does not significantly affect dual task interference nor prioritization while reactive step dual tasking. While these effects should be treated with caution, these results would suggest that baseline cognitive status may not play a critical role in dual task interference or attentional allocation in both people with PD and healthy older adults. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Exercise and Wellness 2020

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The process of generating a phonological code from print is widely described as automatic. This claim is tested in Chapter 1 by assessing whether phonological recoding uses central attention in the context of the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) paradigm. Task 1 was a tone discrimination task and Task 2 was reading aloud. Nonword letter length and grapheme-phoneme complexity yielded additive effects with SOA in Experiments 1 and 2 suggesting that <em>assembled phonology</em> uses central attention. Neighborhood density (N) yielded additive effects with SOA in Experiments 3 and 4, suggesting that one form of lexical contribution to phonological recoding also uses central attention. Taken together, the results of these experiments are <em>inconsistent</em> with the widespread claim that phonological codes are computed automatically. Chapter 2 begins by reconsidering the utility of ?automaticity? as an explanatory framework. It is argued that automaticity should be replaced by accounts that make more specific claims about how processing unfolds. Experiment 5 yielded underadditivity of long-lag word repetition priming with decreasing SOA, suggesting that an early component of the lexical contribution to phonology does not use central attention. There was no evidence of Task 1 slowing with decreasing SOA in Experiments 6 and 7, suggesting that phonological recoding processes are postponed until central attention becomes available. Theoretical development in this field (and others) will be facilitated by abandoning the idea that skilled performance inevitably means that all the underlying processes are automatic.

This thesis aims to explore the role of executive functions in multitasking. Research has shown that severe performance decrements often arise in dual-task performance, also called multitasking, as compared to single task performance. This reflects a limitation in processing temporally overlapping information. Interference between tasks arises due to a bottleneck process limited to processing only one task at a time. It has been proposed that this interference is resolved by executive functions. However, the dual-task paradigm employed in this thesis, Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) paradigm, (Pashler, 1994) is typically investigated in the field of human action performance, and the exact concept of executive functions remains underspecified. However, while underspecified in the area of action performance, executive functions have been investigated in detail in the field of memory research, more specifically in the context of working memory (WM). Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to investigate whether the executive functions in PRP are related to the executive functions as discussed in the context of WM. To test this question, we combined the PRP paradigm with a WM task, creating a complex WM span task. If the executive functions of WM and PRP are indeed related, then an interaction between the two tasks should be evident. Participants were presented with a sequence of letters to remember, followed by a processing block in which they had to perform either a single task or a dual-task, and finally were asked to recall the letters. Results (Chapter 2) showed that recall performance decreased when performing a dual-task as compared to performing a single task. This supports the assumption that PRP dual-tasks demand executive functions of WM. Following this, two other experiments were performed each with a different parametric modulation of the processing demands of the PRP dual task; response order (fixed vs random; Chapter 3) and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA, short vs long; Chapter 4) of the component tasks. Recall performance was lower after a more difficult dual-task compared to an easier dual-task, which again indicates that demands on executive functions are increased in the dual-task. While previous neuroscientific research indeed showed that dual-tasks as well as WM tasks rely on lateral-prefrontal cortices (LPFC), it remains unknown whether both tasks activate the same areas or different sub-areas of the LPFC. Therefore, this study (Chapter 6) investigated how the neuroanatomical correlates of both dual-task and WM compare to each other. The brain activation for the PRP and WM tasks showed considerable overlap as well as some differentiation. Both tasks activated, among other areas, the inferior frontal junction. With respect to differences, the PRP task activated more the inferior middle frontal gyrus (MFG) whilst the WM component activated more the superior MFG. Thus, results support the assumption that PRP dual-tasks demand the executive functions of WM. This will allow us to inform theoretical models of cognition and to get a better understanding of human cognition. Future studies can build on this in order to create a more consolidated conceptualisation of the relationship between WM and multitasking.