On an internal process of errors in a continuous addition Task

Abstract

The study of calculation errors in the continuous addition task has been paid attention to only the single calculation operation, so far. However, to calculate as many as possible, subjects will try to skillfully make the subtask parallel. In this paper, the hypothesis that the failure in the synchronization of the subtasks in the parallel operation leads “in-stream” errors was proposed, and an experiment to verify it was carried out. The continuous addition task was imposed on subjects in the “masked” condition, where a device that masks the next calculation task was used, and in the “transparent” condition, where a device that removed the mask was used. As a result, in the transparent condition, the number of “in-stream” errors was more than in the masked condition. Moreover, the possibility of originating from cognitive difficulty was found, rather than some algorithms leading the calculation error. The necessity for introducing the viewpoint of the parallelism of the task and cognitive difficulty was suggested from these results.