Effects of explicit sway-minimization on postural-suprapostural dual-task performance

Participants performed a visual search task under immersive visualization conditions while standing in open or closed stance. In the combined instruction condition, participants were asked to minimize their sway while they performed the search task, and in the search-only condition, they were advised that sway was not of interest, and they were asked to focus their efforts on performing the search task. Regardless of instructions, participants swayed more and made more errors as search load increased. Participants also succeeded in reducing their sway when asked to do so. While search in closed stance tended to be faster than in open stance under search-only instructions, this pattern reversed significantly under combined instructions. We suggest that neither the facilitatory control hypothesis nor any resource-competition model of postural-suprapostural dual-tasking can fully account for the observed interplay of task-facilitation and task-interference effects. We offer adaptive resource-sharing as an alternative to these theories. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.