Traditional general resource sharing accounts of cognitive-balance interference fall short of a mechanistic explanation of these phenomena. Therefore, it is necessary to capture the microstructure of interference in multitasking situations involving body balance control. Assuming that interference between the cognitive and balance domain is caused by “micro-bottlenecks”, we applied a methodological approach that allows the evaluation of intermittent crosstalk between cognition and balance control based on single cognitive events such as the processing of individual cognitive stimuli and response selection. In this talk, we present
data from a within-subject experiment that contrasts two types of cognitive conflict with respect to their impact on short-term balance control. Cognitive-balance interference effects in a traditional Simon task with characters as targets presented laterally, which causes overlap between a target‘s distractor dimension (spatial location of the target) and the manual responses, will be evaluated against a spatial Stroop task, that increases spatial overlap of the primary target dimension with the overlap between distractor dimension and responses. Preliminary results of an ongoing study will be discussed.