Number 317 - October 2009

Multi-taskers Distracted Study Says
by Karen Kaplan, Seattle Times Aug 28, 2009 Brains work differently from Single-taskers
Are some people wired for multi-tasking? Do their brains work differently than those folks who are able to concentrate on a single activity despite myriad distractions?    Apparently so, according to a study in this week's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.    Stanford University researchers recruited 19 undergrads who were heavy-duty multi-taskers--they were at the top of their class in their ability to read, watch TV, listen to music, send and receive text messages check their e-mail and surf the web simultaneously--and 22 others who rarely did two or three of those things at once. Volunteers in both groups submitted to tests.    It turns out the single taskers do a better job of filtering out irrelevant stimuli compared with the multi-taskers. To measure this, the volunteers were asked to gauge whether a red rectangle had changed its orientation on a computer screen without getting distracted by a bunch of blue rectangles. The more blue rectangles there were, the worse the multi-taskers did. But the distracting rectangles had no effect on the single-taskers' performance, the study found.    As further evidence that multi-taskers are prone to distraction, a second test found that changing the color of letters that flashed on a computer screen caused them to take 77 milliseconds longer than single-	taskers to decide whether they were looking at the letter "X." (The multi-taskers were just as accurate, however.) Other exercises found that multi-taskers have the same problem when it comes to cluttering their working memory with extraneous stuff.    Presumably, someone with a lot of multi-tasking experience would be skilled at toggling between two tasks. To test this, volunteers were shown a letter and a number together on a computer screen. They were asked to decide whether the letter was a consonant or a vowel or whether the number was even or odd. The researchers found that it took 167 milliseconds longer for the multi-taskers to switch between the letter and the number tasks than it did for the single taskers.    Taken together, the results seem to indicate that the multi-taskers "approach fundamental information-processing activities differently than" single-taskers, the researchers concluded.    But why? Does a history of multi-tasking make it difficult for people to focus? Or do they become multi-taskers because they are naturally attracted to a range of stimuli? That question remains unanswered.    But the answer is important, especially for single-taskers. Although they performed better on the tests, it's clear these modern times favor those who can manage mutiple forms of media at one time. If it's hard for single taskers to adapt, they might "be increasingly unable to cope with the changing media environment," the researchers concluded.
Number 317 - October 2009