The Effect of Mild Motion Sickness and Soporific Symptoms on Multitasking Cognitive Strategy

We investigate how mild motion sickness and soporific symptoms affect cognitive strategy when performing in a multitasking environment. During two 1-hour sessions, subjects (N=39) performed four concurrent tasks (memory, arithmetic, visual, auditory). Analysis of the cognitive strategy is based on task dwell time, defined as the amount of time the screen cursor is in each task screen quadrant. Results show that the arithmetic task consistently suffers from the development of motion sickness symptoms, and increased drowsiness. Symptomatic individuals reduce the time allocated to the complex arithmetic task and increase time to the, simpler, visual task. Furthermore, symptomatic individuals demonstrate increased reaction time of correct responses in the arithmetic task, and decreased number of responses. Results provide evidence that motion sickness and soporific symptoms affect multitasking cognitive strategy with symptomatic individuals shifting focus from more complex to simpler tasks. We discuss a plausible explanation based on the performance-under-stress perspective.