Habitual Multitaskers Do It Badly

iandoh writes "According to a group of Stanford researchers, people who frequently multitask don't 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. In other words, multitaskers are bad at multitasking. The research team is also studying how to design computer voices for cars that result in safer driving." Reader AliasMarlowe adds "The comparison involved multitasking with a number of attention or context related tests. For the study, multitasking was defined as consuming multiple media sources at once — gaming, TV, IM, email, etc. Interestingly, the habitual multitaskers were much worse at multitasking than the single taskers in these relatively straightforward tests. In self-assessment the multitaskers considered themselves good at it and the single taskers considered themselves bad at it. An extreme case of the Dunning-Kruger effect, perhaps, with consequences for business and society."

Comments

From the people who brought us clippy

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that one of the researchers behind this, Cliff Nass, was the brains behind Clippy.

Yes, it's a load of bollocks basically.

[Xest]

Basically, a guy wanted to find out what the differences are between those who multi-task a lot and those who don't, or feel they are unable to multi-task well.

He set up an arbitrary experiment that supposedly tests your ability to multi-task and those who multi-task a lot did not do very well at his experiment, hence his conclusion was that multi-taskers are bad at multi-tasking.

The problem I see with his experiment, and more importantly, his conclusion, is that he assumes the various tests he did actually are all that are required to judge someone's ability to multi-task - effectively he wasn't testing multi-tasking in his experiments, only performing phsycological tests that he assume are the traits that are required to be an effective multi-tasker.

An experiment cited in the BBC article is one where there is a screen with 2 red rectangles and a number of blue rectangles which is displayed briefly and then the screen is displayed again and the subject has to say whether or not a red rectangle has been rotated. The link to multi-tasking in this particular experiment is weak, I can only guess the assumption is that to multi-task better you need to be able to track multiple objects on screen in detail but that seems to be merely speculation on behalf of the researcher.

Doing research on this sort of thing is fair enough, but the fact they seem to have come to the outright conclusion that multi-taskers suck at multi-tasking seems quite a leap from what their research actually shows - that there's simply a statistical link between someone's ability to multi-task and how badly/how well someone can do in those specific experiments which in themselves may or may not tell us anything about someone's ability to multi-task.

I would've thought a better experiment would, you know, involve multi-tasking? An experiment with say a simplified user interface where there are multilple blocks (Windows) where a basic task has to be performed in each but each has a differing time limit as to how quickly it must be completed. Simple, effective, and a good test of multi-tasking ability.

But then, that might not have given them the results they wanted that would get them headlines that the world's media would blindly follow.