2020年8月1日雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Multitasking Debate--Can you do them at the same time

2020年8月1日雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Multitasking Debate--Can you do them at the same time

A

Talking on the phone while driving isn't the only situation where we're worse at multitasking than we might like to think we are. New studies have identified a bottleneck in our brains that some say means we are fundamentally incapable of true multitasking If experimental findings reflect real-world performance, people who think they are multitasking are probably just underperforming in all — or at best, all but one - of their parallel pursuits. Practice might improve your performance, but you will never be as good as when focusing on one task at a time.

B

The problem, according to Rene Marois, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is that there's a sticking point in the brain. To demonstrate this, Marois devised an experiment to locate it. Volunteers watch a screen and when a particular image appears, a red circle, say, they have to press a key with their index finger. Different coloured circles require presses from different fingers. Typical response time is about half a second, and the volunteers quickly reach their peak performance. Then they learn to listen to different recordings and respond by making a specific sound. For instance, when they hear a bird chirp, they have to say “ba” an electronic sound should elicit a “ko”, and so on. Again, no problem. A normal person can do that in about half a second, with almost no effort.

C

The trouble comes when Marois shows the volunteers an image, and then almost immediately plays them a sound. Now they're flummoxed. “If you show an image and play a sound at the same time, one task is postponed/5 he says. In fact, if the second task is introduced within the half-second or so it takes to process and react to the first, it will simply be delayed until the first one is done. The largest dual-task delays occur when the two tasks are presented simultaneously; delays progressively shorten as the interval between presenting the tasks lengthens(see Diagram).

D

There are at least three points where we seem to get stuck, says Marois. The first is in simply identifying what we're looking at. This can take a few tenths of a second, during which time we are not able to see and recognise a second item. This limitation is known as the "attentional blink,5: experiments have shown that if you're watching out for a particular event and a second one shows up unexpectedly any time within this crucial window of concentration, it may register in your visual cortex but you will be unable to act upon it Interestingly, if you don’t expect the first event, you have no trouble responding to the second. What exactly causes the attentional blink is still a matter for debate.

E

A second limitation is in our short-term visual memory. It's estimated that we can keep track of about four items at a time, fewer if they are complex. This capacity shortage is thought to explain, in part, our astonishing inability to detect even huge changes in scenes that are otherwise identical, so-called “change blindness”. Show people pairs of near-identical photos - say, aircraft engines in one picture have disappeared in the other - and they will fail to spot the differences. Here again, though, there is disagreement about what the essential limiting factor really is. Does it come down to a dearth of storage capacity, or is it about how much attention a viewer is paying?

F

A third limitation is that choosing a response to a stimulus — braking when you see a child in the road, for instance, or replying when your mother tells you over the phone that she5s thinking of leaving your dad — also takes brainpower. Selecting a response to one of these things will delay by some tenths of a second your ability to respond to the other. This is called the “response selection bottleneck” theory, first proposed in 1952.

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雅思阅读真题题目：部分

Question 28-32

Which paragraph contains the following information?

28. A theory explained delayhappens when selecting one reason.

29. Different age groups respond toimportant things differently.

30. Conflicts happened when visualand audio elements emerge simultaneously.

31. An experiment designed todemonstrate blocks for multitasking.

32. A viewpoint favors optimisticside of multitasking performance.

。。。。。。。

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