Abstract
Multitasking is part of the everyday lives of both adolescents and adults. We often multitask during social interactions by simultaneously keeping track of other non-social information. Here, we examined how keeping track of non-social information impacts the ability to navigate social interactions in adolescents and adults. Participants aged 11–17 and 22–30 years old were instructed to carry out two tasks, one social and one non-social, within each trial. The social task involved referential communication, requiring participants to use social cues to guide their decisions, which sometimes required taking a different perspective. The non-social task manipulated cognitive load by requiring participants to remember non-social information in the form of one two-digit number (low load) or three two-digit numbers (high load) presented before each social task stimulus. Participants showed performance deficits when under high cognitive load and when the social task involved taking a different perspective, and individual differences in both trait perspective taking and working memory capacity predicted performance. Overall, adolescents were less adept at multitasking than adults when under high cognitive load. These results suggest that multitasking during social interactions incurs performance deficits, and that adolescents are more sensitive than adults to the effects of cognitive load while multitasking.
Highlights
The ability to navigate social interactions continues to develop throughout human adolescence [1]
It is unknown whether the ability to process social cues or take a different perspective is affected by multitasking during social situations, and if this relationship changes across development
Following the condition by perspective interaction by comparing DP and DA conditions in same or different perspective trials instead showed that participants were more accurate when using social cues to select the correct object compared to non-social cues (p < 0.001), but only when participants shared the same perspective as the director
Summary
The ability to navigate social interactions continues to develop throughout human adolescence [1]. (c) director task (self-paced) director present (d) director absent M. Previous work has shown that the tendency to take a different perspective in social interactions continues to increase during adolescence and into young adulthood [2]. We examined how keeping track of non-social information affects the ability to attend to social cues and adopt another person’s perspective during social interactions in a group of adolescents and young adults
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