Media multitasking

Media multitasking involves using TV, the Web, radio, telephone, print, or any other media in conjunction with another. Also referred to as "simultaneous media use", or "multicommunicating", this behavior has emerged as increasingly common, especially among younger media users. The shift toward more frequent multitasking occurred basically at the turn of the century (around year 2000) and media multitasking still continues to gain popularity among young people and especially students.

Much of this multitasking is not inherently coupled or coordinated, except by the user. For example, a user may be browsing the Web, listening to music playing video games, using e-mail, or talking on the phone while watching TV. More directly coordinated forms of media multitasking are emerging in the form of "coactive media" and particularly "coactive TV".

A touchstone 2009 study by Stanford University published in PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, "Cognitive control in media multitaskers", used experiments to compare heavy media multitaskers to light media multitaskers in terms of their cognitive control and ability to process information. Findings from the experiment include: 1) When intentionally distracting elements were added to experiments, heavy media multitaskers were on average 77 milliseconds slower than their light media multitasker counterparts at identifying changes in patterns; 2) In a longer-term memory test that invited participants to recall specific elements from earlier experiments, the high media multitaskers more often falsely identified the elements that had been used most frequently as intentional distracters; 3) In the presence of distracting elements, high media multitaskers were 426 milliseconds slower than their counterparts to switch to new activities and 259 milliseconds slower to engage in a new section of the same activity. The researchers conclude that the experiments "suggest that heavy media multitaskers are distracted by the multiple streams of media they are consuming, or, alternatively, that those who infrequently multitask are more effective at volitionally allocating their attention in the face of distractions." This slowing in performance that can be seen when people multitask is called interference in the Cognitive Bottleneck Theory (CBT). According to this theory, people have only a limited amount of cognitive resources, which allows us to only focus and complete one task at a time. When people try to do several things at once, or multitask, their performance suffers because the completion of their tasks slowed down, due to a constraint called a cognitive bottleneck. A good metaphor to describe the cognitive bottleneck is that of a traffic jam. When an accident occurs on a highway, and several lanes of cars are forced to pass through a single lane, the traffic slows down. Over the decades of research, researchers tried to disprove this theory. Although scientists found a handful of activities that people can do at the same time without slowing, these activities are so simple and so far removed from what people normally do, they cannot be used as support for people's ability to multitask. In fact, a top team of researchers (from top universities and NASA) reviewed the extensive literature on multitasking and concluded that hundreds of studies show that slowing will happen when people try to multitask, and even many of the studies that were designed to show that people can multitask without interference still showed that they CANNOT multitask. Therefore, these researchers warn people that when they attempt to multitask, especially when doing complex and potentially dangerous tasks (such as driving and using their cell-phones to talk or text), they will always encounter the bottleneck which will cause their performance to suffer, either by being slower than usual or by making more mistakes.

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