Abstract
Practicing two simultaneous tasks in an extensive manner reduces the performance impairments (i.e., dual-task costs) that occur in dual-task situations compared to single-task situations. The present study provides empirical tests of the latent bottleneck model to explain this reduction and thus the practice-related improvement in dual-task performance. To do so, in three experiments, participants practiced a visual-manual and an auditory-verbal task in single-task and dual-task trials for several sessions. In these experiments, we changed the duration of the response selection stages of the two tasks after practice and analyzed the resulting effects on the reaction times (RTs) during subsequent transfer. The results showed a pattern of selective prolongations of the RTs in the two tasks, which depends on the location of the manipulated process relative to a presumed latent processing bottleneck. The manipulation of the time at bottleneck stages in the longer (auditory-verbal) task did not propagate into the RTs of the shorter task, while prolongations of bottleneck stages of a shorter (visual-manual) task propagated into longer task RTs after practice. These results are consistent with a latent bottleneck model of dual-task practice.

This is the shocking moment a dancing robot goes berserk at a restaurant, sending food flying while staff try to drag it away.

Customers at the Haidilao hotpot restaurant in San Jose, California, were enjoying their meals when a humanoid started showing off some moves.

While performing a dance routine, involving waving its arms and shaking its hips, the robot suddenly slams its hands down on a table.

This sends chopsticks and bright yellow sauce flying into the air, while staff race over to try and turn it off.

But the humanoid continues to dance throughout the altercation – which saw three employees wrestle with the robot and try to drag it away by the scruff of its neck.

The operating system of the universe isn’t going to debug itself

CERN is nothing like today's agentic AI jockeys, who mostly rely on pre-set weights and generic TPUs and GPUs to generate their slop. CERN burns custom nanosecond-speed AI into the silicon itself just to eliminate excess data.

A US jury found Google and Meta liable for $3 million in damages ($4.3 million) in a landmark social media addiction lawsuit that will influence thousands of similar cases against the tech companies.

The plaintiff in the case, a 20-year-old woman, accused the tech companies of causing harm by deliberately designing addictive platforms.

She told the court she began using YouTube when she was six years old and Instagram when she was nine, and became addicted to using it "all day long", which worsened her mental health.

After nine days of deliberations, the jury in Los Angeles, California, found the parent companies of Instagram and YouTube — Meta and Google — were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms.

They found that both companies knew, or should have known, that their services posed a danger to minors, that they failed to warn users of that danger adequately, and that a reasonable platform operator would have done so......

Microsoft’s Clippy was put out to pasture a quarter century ago. This hapless, and some would say ‘irritating,’ productivity assistant would no longer be enabled by default in Office, starting April 11, 2001. Nowadays, it is easy to remember Clippy with some fondness through rose-tinted retro spectacles. But, in its era, Clippy’s repetitive catch-all catch phrases such as “It looks like you’re writing a letter” and “Would you like help with that?” would soon erode any tolerance you might have for cute character-based digital assistants.

Some esteemed figures in the computer industry think that the introduction of Clippy might have been a "tragic misunderstanding" of research conducted at Stanford University on breaking barriers in human-machine interaction. Indeed, there must have been something seriously wrong with a ‘helpful’ project like this for it to attract so much ire and ridicule among users and tech commentators.