A study of three sets of "ecologically" valid tests of multitasking behaviour in healthy subjects and clinical cases

Professor Raymond C K CHAN
Ph.D., University of Hong Kong
Department of Psychology,
Sun Yat-Sen University

Abstract

Clinical studies indicate that damage to the frontal lobes may result in deficits in performing multitasking tests in experimental conditions and is most probably associated with subjective complaints of performing simultaneous tasks in everyday life scenarios. Recently, some more ecologically valid tests of multitasking have been developed, namely the Six Elements Test (Shallice & Burgess, 1991), the Hotel Test (Manly et al., 2002), and the Greenwich Test (Burgess et al., 2000). As yet, very few studies have been conducted to explore the construct of these tests. I will present 4 studies examining the construct validity and clinical utility of these multitasking tests among healthy subjects and clinical cases. The preliminary findings suggest that the 3 sets of tests of multitasking behaviour, presumably developed from the same theoretical framework, are actually capturing different components of multitasking behaviour. However, they are sensitive enough to evaluate multitasking behaviour in different clinical cases including adult strokes and children with ADHD.