Special Coverage
Media Multitasking Does Not Interfere with Lab-Based Multitasking (95)
Jesus Lopez and Joseph Orr (Texas A&M University)
Summary by Brett Myers, Digital Content Associate Editor
This recap is part of a special series of session summaries
from the Psychonomic Society's 61st Annual Meeting. To read the rest of the series, click here.
How Many Devices Can You Use At Once?
Jesus
Lopez
talks about work with Joseph
Orr
on the effects of multitasking with multiple media
sources.
We’ve all done it. Imagine running two Zoom sessions
simultaneously on different computers, texting your friend about lunch, having
a family member watch television in the same room, and having music play in the
background… all at the same time. It may seem like a lot, but we do this kind
of “media multitasking” quite often these days.
via GIPHY
Lopez and Orr wanted to see if these multitasking behaviors
carried over to the lab environment. They asked participants a series of
questions to determine their habitual level of multitasking at home. Then they
brought them into the lab to see if they demonstrate similar behaviors.
They designed an experiment where participants completed a
mathematical task on one page. Participants would randomly get a pop-up
notification (much like a notification on a smartphone) on the screen that
invites them to complete a different task on another page. Participants were
allowed to switch between tasks volitionally.
Overall, they found a low switch rate in this experiment, where
participants didn’t switch to the secondary task very often.
Therefore, they designed another experiment that would hopefully
entice participants to switch between pages more frequently. In this design,
participants received +/- 3 points for completing the primary task, and they
received +/- 10 to 25 points for completing the secondary task. Still,
participants were not very tempted by the pop-ups to switch over and multitask.
They found no effect of outside multitasking habits on the
tendency to multitask in the lab. Future work will try to entice them to switch
more with sounds or other motivating tasks. The current findings suggest that
multitasking does not affect cognitive performance in their tasks.
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