A new study offers evidence that heavy media multitaskers actually perform worse at task-switching - according to the researchers, this is "likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set". Makes sense to me. The findings appear in Cognitive control in media multitaskers, published by Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Stanford's news unit released a plain-English explanation of the evidence, including helpful interviews from the researchers: Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows. "People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory, or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time.... High-tech jugglers are everywhere – keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television, and jumping from one website to another while plowing through homework assignments. 'We kept looking for what [multitaskers] are better at, and we didn't find it,' said Ophir, the study's lead author and a researcher in Stanford's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab."
You know who you are. Test subjects were divided into two groups: People who regularly do a lot of media multitasking, and people who don't. During several experiments, the researchers expected the heavy multitaskers to excel at something compared to the other group. But it didn't work out that way. The experiments asked people to do things like look at flash cards with rectangles or letters and identify whether they changed from one card to another. "'The low multitaskers did great,' Ophir said. 'The high multitaskers were doing worse and worse the further they went along because they... had difficulty keeping them sorted in their brains.'"
The researchers also investigated whether heavy multitaskers excel at switching between tasks. Nope. '"They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing,' Ophir said. 'The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them.'"
The research abstract is relatively straightforward, though it tells us less than it could, and is written in typical academic-journal style. It says that "A series of experiments addressed whether there are systematic differences in information processing styles between chronically heavy and light media multitaskers. A trait media multitasking index was developed to identify groups of heavy and light media multitaskers. These two groups were then compared along established cognitive control dimensions. Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set."
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