Summary
The goal-setting approach to task motivation is applied to examine the way in which subjects control their performance on two concurrently performed tasks under the guidance of different goals in a dual-task situation. The tasks were a simple auditory-manual reaction time (RT) task and a visual-manual pursuit-tracking task. The goal conditions assigned alternatively to the tasks differed with respect to goal specificity and feedback information (KR) given after the trials. It is shown that the improvement of performance in the task with hard, specific goals is achieved in both cases at the cost of the concurrently performed other task which, on the basis of a lack of feedback and a rather unspecific goal instruction, should have a lower priority. The data reveal some strategies hidden behind these overall changes of the average performance at both tasks. For the RT task, the adjustment to the different goals is mainly achieved by changes in the temporal control or preparatory processes as can be inferred from the RT distributions as well as from the analysis of some typical errors. For the tracking task, changes in the tracking accuracy within the overlapping RT intervals are the best indicators for the performance control under the different goal conditions.
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This research was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Kl 408/4-2)
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Schmidt, KH., Kleinbeck, U. & Brockmann, W. Motivational control of motor performance by goal setting in a dual-task situation. Psychol. Res 46, 129–141 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00308598
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00308598