A central bottleneck perspective on research in the Journal of experimental psychology: Human perception & performance and beyond.

Performing two tasks simultaneously produces dual-task costs, that is, task performance is impaired under dual-task conditions compared with the separate task performance under single-task conditions. Seminal publications in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance paved the way for a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underlying these dual-task costs. In particular, to explain these costs, these publications expressed the idea of a processing bottleneck that produces interference between two tasks in a dual-task situation. This bottleneck idea inspired our research on (a) specifying the nature of this bottleneck, (b) the neural mechanisms of active coordination of bottleneck processing, and (c) the mechanisms underlying the practice-related improvement of dual-task performance. In the present article, we illustrate in detail how the seminal publications on processing bottlenecks in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance shaped our individual research careers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).