Jenna Donet¹, Joe Opdenaker¹, Philip Marshall¹, Miranda Scolari¹; ¹Texas Tech University

People often rely on external aids to support cognitive performance, a process known as cognitive offloading. Most research on offloading examines memory-based tasks in self-paced environments; less is known about offloading in rapid, attention-demanding tasks. We conducted an orientation and contrast discrimination task (n =24) where change magnitudes between serially presented gratings varied across four levels of difficulty. The experimental group could offload by requesting an optional cue before each trial, which indicated the relevant dimension. There was no additional cost associated with selecting to offload. The control group always received the dimensional cue without request. As expected, response accuracy significantly decreased across levels of difficulty for both groups. Furthermore, participants took longer to respond on the more difficult blocks, and this effect was largely driven by the experimental group. Within this group, participants tended to electively offload more frequently on the most difficult trials (50%) compared to the easiest trials (34%). A binomial generalized linear model revealed that task difficulty was a significant predictor of the decision to offload on a trial-by-trial basis; while the decision to offload also predicted accuracy at the trial level. These results indicate that participants can make rapid decisions to offload attentional demands, and that they may consider task difficulty to do so. However, the rates of offloading suggest that on the easiest trials, participants may have found attending to both dimensions less effortful than deciding to offload.