US: Multi-taskers distracted by everything: study
Wed Aug 26 04:54:43 EST 2009
Tue Aug 25 18:54:43 UTC 2009
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 25 AFP - When it comes to getting things done, multi-tasking is a bane not a blessing, according to Stanford University researchers.
While internet age hipsters may be simultaneously listening to iPods, watching online videos, instant messaging, checking email and firing off updates to Facebook, most likely they are not doing any of it well.
"They're suckers for irrelevancy," said Stanford communication professor Clifford Nass, whose research team released its findings on Monday. "Everything distracts them."
Stanford researchers concluded that people prone to juggling streams of input such as emails, web searches, text chats and videos perform worse than those who prefer to handle one task at a time.
"We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn't find it," Eyal Ophir, the study's lead author and a researcher in Stanford's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, said of multi-taskers.
Social science has long held that people cannot process more than one string of information at a time, according to the researchers, who wanted to figure out how multi-taskers evaded that rule.
They are not exempt from that rule, according to tests conducted with 100 students divided into heavy multi-taskers and one-task-at-a-time types.
"They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing," Ophir said of multi-taskers. "They can't keep things separate in their minds."
Testing also showed that multi-taskers were not superior when it came to remembering or organising information in their minds. Researchers showed students letters and asked them to remember repeated appearances.
"The low multi-taskers did great," Ophir said. "The high multi-taskers were doing worse and worse the further they went along because they kept seeing more letters and had difficulty keeping them sorted in their brains."
The researchers are trying to figure out whether chronic multi-tasking is ruining people's ability to concentrate or whether people born that way are drawn to multi-tasking.
"When they're in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they're not able to filter out what's not relevant to their current goal," said researcher Anthony Wagner, an associate professor of psychology.
"That failure to filter means they're slowed down by that irrelevant information."
