By Kira Ruffner
Have you ever noticed that your memory seems to deteriorate after a week full of multitasking? Have you ever wondered if multitasking is harming your work or your concentration? These questions are all addressed by Stanford professor Anthony Wagner in a study he did with his colleague Clifford Nass, on the effects of media multitasking and attention. He was not convinced by early data, and he told Nass said to do more tests. Eleven years later he co-authored the paper with neuroscientist Melina Uncapher of the University of California, San Francisco, in which he noticed a trend: People who frequently use many types of media at once aka “heavy media multitaskers” performed significantly worse on simple memory tasks. He addressed the contents of his study in a Q&A style format with Stanford News. Wagner answered a question asking him about how he got interested in this topic. He said that his colleagues Cliff Nass and Eyal Ophir had the question: “With the explosion of media technologies that has resulted in there being multiple simultaneous channels available that we can switch between, how might this relate to human cognition?” They came to him with their early findings, and he thought they were crazy, but a few years later he realized there was a connection to media and memory. When asked to define heavy multitaskers vs light multitaskers, Wagner has said that people don’t multitask, we task switch because the word “multitasking” implies that people can do two or more things at once. This is not true, and in reality brains only allow people to do one thing at a time and they have to switch back and forth. Wagner gave an example of what a heavy media multitaskers may look like: he said they may have many media channels open at once and they switch between them. They might be writing an essay, then check a football game, then respond to texts and messages, and then try to get back to work, but they get an email and have to answer it. In comparison, he said that a light media multitasker would only be writing the academic paper or may only switch between a couple of media, and they might turn on Do Not Disturb so they only get really urgent messages, and might put away their phone. Wagner and Ness assessed the different forms of memory in different ways. To assess the working memory they used simple short-delay memory tasks. For example, in one test they showed a set of oriented blue rectangles, then took them from the screen and asked the subject to remember it. Then they showed them another set of rectangles and asked if any had changed orientation. To measure memory capacity they did the same test with different numbers of rectangles and determined how performance changed with increasing memory loads. Finally, to measure the ability to filter out distraction sometimes they added distractors like red rectangles that the subjects were told to ignore. Wagner and Ness noticed a few trends in their data. In about 50% of the studys they saw the heavy media multitaskers were significantly underperforming on tasks with working memory and sustained attention, while the other half have no significant difference. Wagner has stated that it is clear there is a negative relationship between media multitasking and memory performance and that high media multitasking is associated with poor performance on memory tests and tasks. While testing subjects, Wagner and Ness noticed something: they hypothesised that potentially reduced working memory occurs in heavy media multitaskers because they have a higher probability of experiencing lapses of attention, and that maybe when demands are low, they underperform but when the demands are high, like when the working memory tasks are harder, there’s no difference between the heavy and light media multitaskers This prompted Wagner and Ness to look at variation between subjects and moment-to-moment changes in a person’s ability to use goals to sustain their memory. Wagner has said that he can't say for sure that multitasking changes memory or attention, as it’s too early to definitively determine cause and effect, but that multitasking isn’t efficient, and people know there are costs of task switching. He also had a piece of advice: “If you’re multitasking while doing something significant, like an academic paper or work project, you’ll be slower to complete it and you might be less successful.” Link to article:: https://news.stanford.edu/2018/10/25/decade-data-reveals-heavy-multitaskers-reduced-memory-psychologist-says/ APA citation: Bates, S. (2018, October 25). Heavy multitaskers have reduced memory. Retrieved May 23, 2019, from https://news.stanford.edu/2018/10/25/decade-data-reveals-heavy-multitaskers-reduced-memory-psychologist-says/ Link to photo: https://businessesgrow.com/2014/07/30/buzzfeed-quizzes-marketing-research/
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