Multitask you ask?
Most of us would think that multitasking would hinder our performance on any given task. How could I possibly do my best at anything when I am constantly distracted with emails, texts, and other multitudes of media distractions? Well, one study suggests that this may not be the case. Two high-school students presented their study, “Capacity Limits of Working Memory: The impact of Media Multitasking on Cognitive Control in the Adolescent Mind” at the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference and Exhibition. Participants in this study were a group of 196 females and 207 males age 10 to 19 years old. All participants completed a series of questions about their daily media habits and took the Stanford Multitasking Media Index to assess how well they multitask. The participants were then randomly assigned to one of two conditions; multitasking or non-multitasking. In the multitasking condition participants simultaneously completed a set of tasks with auditory, visual, and cognitive distractions. The other half of the participants completed the tasks in order without any distractions.
The results show that participants who scored low on the Stanford Multitasking Media Index spent an average of 20 minutes per day multitasking. They also spent an average of 2.5 hours a day doing homework. .08% of this time was spent multitasking. On the other hand, participants who scored high on the Stanford Multitasking Media Index spent an average of more than 3.5 hours per day multitasking. These participants also multitasked during an average of over 50% of the 3.5 hours they spent doing homework per day. These results show that while most people performed better when they focused on one task at a time, there’s an exception to this. The high media multitaskers performed best when they were multitasking in a distracting environment. This group of people was better able to filter out the distractions than the low media multitaskers were. All of this suggests that young people who spend long periods of their day multitasking between media and performing daily tasks might have developed an enhanced working memory.
These finding are supported by Bor’s explanation of consciousness in his book, The Ravenous Brain. He explains attention as the “data-filtering and -boosting mechanism” of the brain (112). He goes on to say that what we attend to is in fact what we are aware of, and in a world where stimuli are constantly being thrown at us there is relatively a small amount of information that we are aware of. So how do we pick what information to pay attention to? Bor explains that there is constant competition among groups of neurons that represent different chunks of information, and the one with the most current biological relevance wins in this battle. However, we can also “consciously create almost any kind of neuronal filter, strongly boosting attention for one feature of the inner or outer world and suppressing others” (126). So maybe the high media multitaskers discussed above have become better able to suppress the distracting stimuli around them.
The way this works is through the use of our working memory. Bor describes the working memory as the conscious, short-term memory, where information from our senses is remembered, rearranged, and evaluated. The working memory is powerful, yet it has a very limited capacity. Many studies have shown that the working memory has a capacity for 4 conscious items. In order to expand our capacity, we group items or information together so that it becomes one single item in our working memory. This is called “chunking”. Our consciousness searches for these chunks of information within the working memory so that they can be used efficiently and automatically. So that no energy is wasted, we don’t need to be aware of this chunking process unless we are dealing with new or complex tasks. Therefore, “consciousness is initially necessary for complex learning, but then largely gets in the way of automatic processing”(155). Bor uses the example of an experienced golfer performing best when he is not thinking about his stroke. Because the stroke comes naturally to him it hinders him to over think it. On the other hand, a beginner golfer should consciously be thinking about his or her stroke, because it’s not automatic to them. This is just like the media multitaskers in the study. The high media multitaskers are used to this media multitasking environment, so when they are forced to focus on one task at a time their performance is hindered, just like the experienced golfer. Perhaps, in our multimedia world, parents and teachers of adolescents should stop telling kids to put down their phones and encourage them to perform their best, however they do so.
American Academy of Pediatrics. (2014, October 10). Some adolescents adept at media multitasking, Research by high school students reveals. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 16, 2014 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141010155023.htm
Bor, D. (2012). The ravenous brain: How the new science of consciousness explains our insatiable search for meaning. New York: Basic Books.
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