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CONNECTING THE DOTS: MULTITASKING AND THE VAPORS
By Robert Bloomfield
I saw Digital Nation last night, the PBS Frontline episode that claims to be about ‘life on the virtual frontier.’ Actually, I only saw the first part of it, and simply couldn’t take it anymore. The emotional thrust of the piece is clearly that life on the virtual frontier is frightening, dysfunctional, and spells the end of all that is good and wholesome. Now, maybe they sprinkle in some hopeful stories, and end on upbeat, but I didn’t stick around to find out.
Now, broadcast television tends to traffic in hope and fear, and the emphasis of this show seemed to be pretty heavy on fear. Hell, handbaskets, you know the drill. As a business professor, though, I traffic in goals and tactics, opportunity and challenges. This is very much the language Sam Driver used today to discuss enterprise applications of virtual worlds, or as he calls them, immersive software platforms.
I want to close today’s show by emphasizing the shortcomings of the hope-and-fear perspective, and to make my point I will talk about a topic that comes up very early in the episode: multitasking.
In Digital Nation, Stanford Processor Clifford Nass tells us that young people who were obsessive multitaskers thought they were great at it, but in fact they really weren’t, and it had other harmful effects on their cognition. These self-proclaimed experts took more time to switch from one task to another then less-frequent multitaskers. Despite their confidence in their abilities, paying attention to an additional task dramatically reduced multitaskers’ performance on other tasks. For example, students were presented with a test of their recollections after a lecture, and they should have been able to get 100% of the questions right, but multitaskers scored only 75%.
Digital Nation presented this information, to my eyes, as a package of doom and gloom. How will our kids compete in a global workplace if they get sucked into multitasking? I don’t think the researchers are asking the right question. I think most people would agree that multitasking is hard, and as a teacher I can guarantee that people who are paying attention to me and something else will recall less of what I say than people who are paying attention only to me. Hey, I mean you, listen up! Thank you. Now back to my point…I think the show did a nice job of showing that young people, who are overly confident about just about all aspects of their lives, are also overconfident about their ability to multitask. It was also effective in showing that people who are multitasking for no good reason aren’t doing themselves much good.
But if we switch to a perspective of goals and tactics, challenges and opportunities, I think a different story emerges. First, before even talking about the research, we need to focus on the goals of multitasking. Does it ever have a valid purpose in the workplace? In many cases, the answer is yes. I don’t believe one can be a successful caterer, NFL quarterback, or talk show host, for that matter, without being able to attend to many different things at once. Digital Nation is that it focuses on settings in which we don’t believe multitasking serves a useful goal. I don’t see a compelling business or educational case for texting with your friends while in the lecture hall, or worse yet, while driving. More generally, let’s ask this question: what if your job demands that you can attend to multiple media channels at once? In this case, not multitasking is simply not an option. So then we need to think about the challenges.
The first challenge is simply that multitasking is very hard. I don’t see much reason to think that kids who simply multitask because its fun have identified the most efficient ways to handle multiple inputs. Clearly we have a lot to learn. The second challenge is a bit more pernicious, and here I draw from the source for the Digital Nation’s discussion of multitasking: Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers, an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Clifford Nass along with Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner.
The key finding is as follows:
Individuals who frequently use multiple media approach fundamental information-processing activities differently than do those who consume multiple media streams much less frequently: their breadth-biased media consumption behavior is indeed mirrored by breadth-biased cognitive control. [High Media Multitaskers] have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment (as seen in the filter task and AX-CPT with distractors), they are less likely to ignore irrelevant representations in memory (two- and three-back tasks), and they are less effective in suppressing the activation of irrelevant task sets (task-switching). This last result is particularly striking given the central role attributed to task-switching in multitasking (25).
These results 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 may be a difference in orientation rather than a deficit; that is, although the data reveal negative effects in HMMs on performance of tasks that require cognitive control, it remains possible that future tests of higher-order cognition will uncover benefits, other than cognitive control, of heavy media multitasking, or will uncover skills specifically exhibited by HMMs not involving cognitive control.
The present data suggest that [Low Media Multitaskers] have a greater tendency for top-down attentional control, and thus they may find it easier to attentionally focus on a single task in the face of distractions. By contrast, HMMs are more likely to respond to stimuli outside the realm of their immediate task, and thus may have a greater tendency for bottom-up attentional control and a bias toward exploratory, rather than exploitative, information processing (26, 27). If so, they may be sacrificing performance on the primary task to let in other sources of information.
Nass and his co-authors are describing what you might call a form of cognitive leakage. As a professor, I face a similar challenge. I tend to lecture a lot to my students, of course. Sometimes that tendency leaks into my home life, and I start lecturing my wife and kids. Oops. It’s something I need to watch out for, but it isn’t the end of the world. At home we can come up with ways to let my family remind me I am not on campus. In the case of multi-tasking, we might need to search for ways to redefine job requirements. For example, we might want to concentrate multi-tasking duties with certain employees, so that the cognitive style that is forced upon them is useful, rather than detrimental, throughout the day. We might want to find ways to ease the transition from multitasking to focused cognition.
These are challenges, but they needn’t be frightening. So as we look ahead to the virtual workplace, which I promise you will involve more multitasking, we are going to have a number of challenges to overcome. But these are challenges, they aren’t boogymen. So let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work on solutions. But despite how it might improve television ratings, let’s not get the vapors, ok?
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