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StefaniResearch

Research

People are constantly asked to do more than one thing at once, and they are worse at it than they think. Most laboratory research stops at two tasks. My dissertation, Exploring triple tasks: A deeper dive into multitasking dynamics, went to three and found that the cost of an added task does not scale the way dual-task models predict. Once a third task is in play, coordinating between tasks costs more than the interference within any one of them.

A second line of work is about attention itself. The eyes leave a fixated item later than the task requires, and later still when the item is threatening or shares features with what is being searched for. How much of that delay belongs to attention and how much to the eyes is the open question. I have looked at it in visual search, in phobia-related attention biases, and more recently in haptic search, where nothing is fixated at all.

Both lines run into applied settings. As Co-PI on a BAAINBw-funded project, I led the technical side of a study combining flight simulation, eye tracking and physiological measurement to find out what predicts multitasking performance in a military context. Task-specific experience predicted it better than any general cognitive measure. I am also interested in whether data collected online holds up against the lab, because that decides how far this kind of research can scale.

Energy

The newer half of my work is energy markets and the economics of a climate-neutral supply. What interests me is pricing. A gas plant can be asked to run when demand is high; wind and solar produce when the weather allows, and the further generation shifts toward them, the less a market built on the old assumption fits. Day-ahead markets, balancing markets, and storage as a way of moving supply through time are what I am working through at the moment.

Recent publications

All publications