Their performance was horrible.īecause the high multitaskers showed they couldn’t ignore things, the researchers figured they were better at storing and organizing information.
But the high multitaskers were constantly distracted by the irrelevant blue images.
They were told to ignore the blue rectangles, and the low multitaskers had no problem doing that. Each configuration was flashed twice, and the participants had to determine whether the two red rectangles in the second frame were in a different position than in the first frame. In one experiment, the groups were shown sets of two red rectangles alone or surrounded by two, four or six blue rectangles. In each of their tests, the researchers split their subjects into two groups: those who regularly do a lot of media multitasking and those who don’t. “We kept looking for what they’re 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. So Nass and his colleagues, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, set out to learn what gives multitaskers their edge. But many researchers have guessed that people who appear to multitask must have superb control over what they think about and what they pay attention to. Social scientists have long assumed that it’s impossible to process more than one string of information at a time. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug.
TV ONETASK SERIES
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.īut after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.
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, a group of Stanford researchers has found. Attention, multitaskers (if you can pay attention, that is): Your brain may be in trouble.
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