Psychological refractory period

The PRP can be used to investigate many questions about divided attention, examining tasks such as reading aloud, language, or driving and talking on the phone.

PRP effects related to personality, age, and level of alcohol or caffeine intake have also been investigated.

[1] An example of a PRP paradigm might be that there is a task 1 which requires participants to push the keyboard-letter 'n' with the right index finger when a square frame was green.

Researchers have used the PRP paradigm design to study a wide variety of different topics in psychology.

[2] PRP studies have challenged the notion that central attention does not play a role in reading aloud.

[3] Upon experimentation, participants were primed with exception words (pin, mint, hint, lint) and pseudohomophones (brain and brane).

[5] Hal Pashler and his colleagues tested subjects in a driving simulation, and as they drove they would occasionally hear a tone.

[7] However, studies have aimed to determine if dual-task practice can help remove elderly disadvantages.

These differences could be due to the fact that older adults have a reduced ability to bypass the central bottleneck, through task automatization.

They then participated in a PRP paradigm, with a manual response to a visual stimulus, followed by a highly practiced auditory vocal task.

These concepts vary in specific mechanisms, however, they both propose an overall limit to the amount of mental activity in which we can engage in.

[10] The bottleneck can be intuitively appreciated by attempting to perform two streams of tasks in parallel without assigning priority to either one.