Can You Get Better at Multitasking? What Practice Can—and Cannot—Change
Practice can make one crowded task feel almost effortless. The harder question is whether that improvement follows you when the rules, signals, and setting all change.
Repeat almost any multitasking task and your performance will improve. You learn where to look, which signal matters, how the controls behave, and when one task is likely to interrupt the other. Reaction times fall. Errors become less frequent. The whole combination starts to feel calmer.
That improvement is real—but it may be narrower than it appears. Getting better at a particular multitasking setup is much easier than developing a general ability that works across unrelated situations. Practice can strengthen coordination, speed up decisions, and make one component more automatic. It does not automatically turn email-plus-writing practice into safer driving, better studying, or effortless management of every competing demand.
This is why Cognitive Train separates specific abilities across its cognitive training tools. Switching rules, monitoring two streams, updating working memory, and responding under dual-task load overlap, but improvement in one does not guarantee equal improvement in the others.
How Far Does Multitasking Practice Travel?
The farther a new situation moves from the practice task, the less certain the benefit becomes.
You become faster and more accurate with the same signals, rules, timing, and response combination.
Improvement may carry to a new task that uses the same kind of switching or coordination process.
A practised game does not automatically improve every job, study session, conversation, or safety-critical activity.
Researchers call the second level near transfer and the third far transfer. Most arguments about brain training become confused because a clear gain on the trained task is presented as though far transfer has already been demonstrated.
Practice Usually Improves the Combination You Practise
The most reliable finding is also the least surprising: people get better at coordinating the particular tasks they repeat.
In a study by Bender and colleagues, participants trained for six sessions on a game combining visuomotor tracking with a perceptual discrimination task. Their dual-task performance improved substantially. Yet the benefit did not transfer to untrained tests of response selection, response inhibition, or spatial attention.
The researchers concluded that practice had helped participants coordinate those specific stimulus-response demands more efficiently. That matters. A pilot, musician, gamer, technician, or athlete often wants exactly this kind of task-specific expertise. It simply should not be sold as a universal upgrade.
A brain-imaging study by Garner and Dux also found that multitasking training improved the practised combination. The neural results suggested that training made the component task representations more distinct within a frontoparietal-subcortical control system, reducing how much the tasks interfered with one another.
Practice may not create “more attention.” It can make a familiar pair demand less attention by sharpening the rules, responses, and coordination pattern already learned.
Enough Practice Can Make One Task More Automatic
A striking 2026 study pushed practice far beyond the usual laboratory dose. Cox and colleagues trained 11 participants for more than 30,000 trials over five to ten weeks on a visual car-categorisation task.
After extensive practice, brain activity associated with the decision shifted away from heavier reliance on the prefrontal cortex and toward visual regions in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex, with stronger connections toward motor-output areas. Participants whose task processing became more independent of the prefrontal cortex also performed the categorisation task better while handling a second demand.
This is strong evidence that extreme practice can change how a specific skill is carried out, allowing it to bypass part of a limited frontal bottleneck. It is not evidence that eleven people developed a general power to combine any two difficult tasks. The task was narrow, practice was enormous, and the study still needs replication in larger samples and other kinds of skill.
Near Transfer Happens More Often Than Far Transfer
Task-switching practice sometimes helps on another switching task, especially when the new task preserves similar timing and control demands.
Zhao and colleagues trained students for 21 days. Switch and mixing costs fell, with much of the gain reaching a plateau after roughly four to six sessions. Participants also improved on another switching task—but only on a limited part of it. There was no benefit on far-transfer measures of interference control, response inhibition, working memory, or general intelligence.
More training did not keep widening the benefit. It mainly made the trained switching process more efficient. This is a useful reality check for anyone assuming that doubling the number of sessions will eventually force a narrow gain to become general.
Some Well-Designed Programs Do Show Broader Benefits
The evidence is not uniformly negative. In the NeuroRacer study, Anguera and colleagues trained adults aged 60 to 85 with an adaptive game combining vehicle control and a sign-response task. Compared with active and no-contact control groups, the multitasking group reduced its multitasking cost. The gains persisted for six months and extended to untrained measures of sustained attention and working memory.
That result shows broader transfer is possible under some conditions. The program was adaptive, carefully designed around cognitive control, and tested in a specific older-adult sample. It does not cancel studies finding task-specific gains; it shows that training design, population, and the relationship between trained and transfer tasks can change the outcome.
Start With a Baseline Before You Train
Begin with Cognitive Train’s Multitasking Test, which covers dual-task cost, rule switching, visual-audio attention, and parallel monitoring. Record the separate results. A broader baseline helps prevent familiarity with one training tool from being mistaken for general improvement.
Use the same device and similar conditions when you test again, and avoid retaking the assessment after every session. Practice on the assessment itself can also raise performance.
Train One Specific Multitasking Demand
The Multitasking Reaction Time Test below is one example of a training tool. It asks you to preserve reaction speed while controlling a second task. Practise the same setup for several sessions and track both speed and errors.
If speed improves while accuracy falls, you may only be changing strategy. Treat gains here as gains on this task first—not proof that unrelated work, study, or driving demands will improve.
Train the Skill That Is Actually Limiting You
Rule switching: use the Task Switch Test. Visual-audio coordination: try the Dual Task Challenge. Parallel monitoring: use the Dual-Stream Reaction Test.
For supporting abilities, the Attention Test examines focus and inhibition, while the N-Back Test challenges continuous updating. More options are available in the full collection of multitasking tests and training tools.
How to Practise Without Fooling Yourself
Define the outcome. Faster switching, fewer missed targets, and steadier reaction time under load are different goals.
Train the components and the combination. Make each task accurate alone, then practise the pair.
Track accuracy with speed. Use fresh stimuli occasionally and test again after a break so warm-up is not mistaken for lasting improvement.
Keep safety-critical tasks out of the experiment. Practise only in controlled settings, never while driving or cycling in traffic.
Measure Improvement After a Training Block
After several sessions, return to the Multitasking Test under similar conditions. Improvement on the trained component is the most plausible result; changes on different components provide a stronger test of transfer.
For separate measures of attention, memory, speed, and reasoning, use the wider collection of online cognitive and brain tests.
The Honest Answer
Yes, you can get better at multitasking. Practice can reduce the cost of a familiar task pair, improve switching on similar tasks, and sometimes make one component automatic enough to free control for another demand.
What practice cannot promise is a general upgrade that follows you everywhere. The most useful approach is to train the exact coordination you need, measure whether the benefit survives new stimuli and a break, and remain sceptical whenever a narrow game score is presented as proof of broad real-world change.
Continue with the separate abilities behind multitasking, or explore the complete collection of multitasking tests, training tools, and research-based guides.