Multitasking?

by John Holbo on April 20, 2011

Kevin Drum posts a fun screed against it. I didn’t know the experimental evidence was so damning, although I’m not surprised. But I am surprised that there is little consideration of what I would have thought was an obvious, major category of multitasking, going back to the Peripatetic School: engaging something with your mind while doing something unrelated, and probably repetitive, with your other muscles. Reading a book while riding the stationary bike. Playing scales or exercises on your instrument, over and over, while listening to the news. What about plain old reading a book while listening to music?

Drum links to an interview that rules this out, definitionally: “Multitasking as we’re studying it here involves looking at multiple media at the same time. So we’re not talking about people watching the kids and cooking and stuff like that. We’re talking about using information, multiple sources.” And there may be a music exception. Maybe we have a special module for that.

Fine, define terms how you like. But this seems misleading, because ‘task’ naturally covers cooking and kid-watching. Multitasking is not necessarily multi-learning but, in the most general sense, multi-doing. For that matter, watching the kids while cooking is obviously exactly like answering every email instantly while listening to a lecture: namely, you are likely to mess something up because you are distracted by the other thing. This may work out ok so long as the threshold of adequacy is low. I would have predicted the success story would be some class of multitaskers who are low-level satisficers. Trying to do many easy things, mostly not failing.

It seems wrong to tie multitasking, as a subject of investigation, to all these proliferating media sources and devices. What’s tied to the devices is the addiction element, not the multi-element. An inner (as opposed to outer) pressure to divide attention. (No one compulsively watches the kids while cooking. It never gets fun, per se.) Finding out that high multitaskers compulsive iPhone fondlers are mostly bad at handling it all seems a bit like finding out that heavy drinkers are typically not good at drinking responsibly. Just as ‘alcoholic’ is a better term than ‘heavy drinker’ for getting a handle on the reasons for the results, so ‘media addict’ rather than ‘high multitasker’ seems like the thing to focus on if you are going to focus, narrowly, on high media consumption cases. (Maybe ‘addict’ is too strong, but surely ‘mild addiction’ is mild enough.)

UPDATE: I didn’t mean to imply that heavy drinkers are ‘typically’, i.e. mostly, alcoholics; just that the explanation for the large numbers of heavy drinkers who, despite increased tolerance, can’t drink responsibly, is typically alcoholism. The naive argument for high competence multitasking is that you ‘build up a tolerance’, as it were: you learn to take more in without being overwhelmed. The fallacy in assuming this will tend to translate into competence is easily seen in the alcohol case, so the analogy seems apt.

{ 57 comments }

1

JP Stormcrow 04.20.11 at 7:51 am

the analogy seems apt.

And so you’ve come to the bar to the ask the drinkers their opinion. “What drinking problem? This place doesn’t close for four or five more hours and I’m well-stocked at home.”

2

JP Stormcrow 04.20.11 at 7:52 am

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

3

dsquared 04.20.11 at 8:14 am

Oh tee oh aitch, there are actually guys who can watch a television, two newswires and a screen of stock tickers simultaneously while conducting a phone conversation and eavesdropping on someone at the next desk. But it’s a learned skill and one that’s considered a pretty valuable form of human capital. The Broker’s Ear, by Donald MacKenzie

4

Tom T. 04.20.11 at 11:16 am

I guess I wonder about selection bias and which way causation runs. By setting out to study “multi-taskers,” you’re likely to sweep in a lot of people with ADD, so you’re not studying normal brains. Instead, you’re seeing people whose abnormalities of cognitive function may be what’s causing them to multi-task.

5

Herman Newticks 04.20.11 at 12:59 pm

@Tom T. – I think the abnormality of cognitive function you’re talking about is being under 30.

I kid. Being young is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a chronic multitasker, but it is correlated.

I was going to suggest ‘multi-attending’ instead of ‘multi-tasking’ but even that’s wrong because it doesn’t suggest the sort of supply-driven attention John has in mind, and because the evidence suggests that those who practice multi-taking mostly are deceiving themselves about actually attending to the information. They skim along the surface of a vast and deep ocean of information, the whole time telling themselves they are master navigators, and never realizing their view is an inch deep and a mile wide.

6

Vance Maverick 04.20.11 at 1:52 pm

Do many people really find it easy to read a book and listen to music at the same time? I don’t — I find my attention to both is degraded. Lately I’ve been using music to help me get through some slow tasks at work, and while it’s better than attempting them unaided, it’s no way to listen to the music.

7

Earwig 04.20.11 at 1:54 pm

I have no “music exception.”

Although I often find myself “listening” to music while reading a book, or, more often, web surfing, the the result is always the same: my engagement with the music was peripheral — I don’t get the same level of stimulation and enjoyment that I do when I devote full attention to it.

How could that be surprising, I wonder.

But I keep doing it.

8

AcademicLurker 04.20.11 at 1:56 pm

9

Tom Hurka 04.20.11 at 2:43 pm

I doubt it’s addiction. In many of the studies subjects are told to do two things at once, so they’re following instructions rather than some inner urge, and their performance on them is then monitored.

Question for academics: is listening to a talk while simultaneously watching the speaker’s PowerPoint slides a form of multitasking that reduces your efficiency at both? I say yes.

10

ejh 04.20.11 at 2:45 pm

Do many people really find it easy to read a book and listen to music at the same time?

Depends on the book, depends on the music.

11

tomslee 04.20.11 at 2:58 pm

Do many people really find it easy to read a book and listen to music at the same time?

There are several pieces of music that are closely linked in my head with what I was reading when I listened to them. When I hear the music I recall the book. I’m sure many others have the same thing happen.

12

J. Otto Pohl 04.20.11 at 3:00 pm

I used to always listen to music when I read at home. Now I generally read without any music. But, I did not really pay close attention to the music while reading. It was more just for background.

13

Vance Maverick 04.20.11 at 3:01 pm

Looking at John’s original, I see that by apposition:

engaging something with your mind while doing something unrelated, and probably repetitive, with your other muscles. … What about plain old reading a book while listening to music?

he appears to be implying that listening to music is not engaging your mind. (I suppose he might be implying that of reading, but having read a few of his posts, I doubt that.)

14

chris 04.20.11 at 3:01 pm

Question for academics: is listening to a talk while simultaneously watching the speaker’s PowerPoint slides a form of multitasking that reduces your efficiency at both? I say yes.

Wouldn’t that depend on whether the speaker coordinates the talk with the slides? (Which ideally they do, but in practice, maybe not.) They’re not different tasks if they’re part of the same task.

15

Patrick Lange 04.20.11 at 3:04 pm

Just to weigh in on the “reading while listening to music,” I do this fairly often, and I’m generally better able to focus on reading/other task when I do, but this only works when I’m listening to music I already know well. Listening to new music requires a different kind of intellectual engagement that overlaps too much with reading.

YMMV and all that.

16

Sev 04.20.11 at 3:27 pm

“They’re not different tasks if they’re part of the same task.”
I’m assuming this is how the people dsquared #3 describes do it.

17

mpowell 04.20.11 at 3:48 pm

I don’t think the comparison to alcoholism is particularly useful. These studies are very interesting as they do suggest that most multitaskers are terrible at it. On the other hand Dsquared rightly points out that there are categories of highly compensated individuals for whom multitasking effectively is a critical job function. I think it would be interesting to see a study to include those people. The thing I remind myself, is that the study is essentially reporting that the average person who likes to multitask is actually worse at it then the average person who doesn’t. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t really good multitaskers out there. It would be interesting to know how cognitive development for these people is influenced by multitasking.

My person experience with multitasking is that if you can handle all the data coming in simultaneously, then you can do it effectively. But if you have to switch your attention back and forth you’re dead. I imagine many of the students on their iphones in class are just not paying attention to the lecture at all and are just unconcerned with the fact that they don’t know what the hell the lecture is actually talking about. They’ve convinced themselves that occasionally glancing up at the board and reading it is giving them an understanding of the material.

18

Vance Maverick 04.20.11 at 3:52 pm

if you can handle all the data coming in simultaneously, then you can do it effectively

That’s a pretty plain tautology there….

19

chris 04.20.11 at 4:00 pm

The thing I remind myself, is that the study is essentially reporting that the average person who likes to multitask is actually worse at it then the average person who doesn’t.

Does it? I thought it was mainly rediscovering Dunning-Kruger and pointing out that people who think they’re good at multitasking aren’t necessarily. Obviously, how often a person is likely to multitask has something to do with how good at it they think they are.

I imagine many of the students on their iphones in class are just not paying attention to the lecture at all and are just unconcerned with the fact that they don’t know what the hell the lecture is actually talking about. They’ve convinced themselves that occasionally glancing up at the board and reading it is giving them an understanding of the material.

Depending on the lecturer (and possibly also the student), going home after class and reading the textbook at your own pace sometimes gives you a better understanding of the material. But even if you realize that, not showing up to the lectures may not be a good idea (even if the school has no attendance policy, you can still miss out on class-specific information that isn’t part of the subject matter, like “there is a paper due next week”). So showing up to class but not paying attention to most of it may be a useful strategy for some classes.

20

JP Stormcrow 04.20.11 at 4:19 pm

Sev@14 is right with “They’re not different tasks if they’re part of the same task.”
I’m assuming this is how the people dsquared #3 describes do it.

Tracking multiple inputs as part of a single (possibly high-level) is a quite different thing than the task-switching described above. Dsquared’s situation reminds me of the navy concept of “having the bubble”.

Although every group expressed clearly their very special response to the demands for integration and interpretation placed on them, only in the Navy did we find a compact term for expressing it. Those who man the combat operations centers of U.S. Navy ships use the term “having the bubble” to indicate that they have been able to construct and maintain the cognitive map that allows them to integrate such diverse inputs as combat status, information flows from sensors and remote observation, and the real-time status and performance of the various weapons and systems into a single picture of the ship’s overall situation and operational status.

21

JP Stormcrow 04.20.11 at 4:19 pm

s/b Tracking multiple inputs as part of a single (possibly high-level) *task*

22

JP Stormcrow 04.20.11 at 4:23 pm

And the quote is from Chapter 7 of Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization. Doing this at work between e-mails and interruptions …

23

sanbikinoraion 04.20.11 at 5:09 pm

Yes, Dsquared – I think there’s a difference between the broker because he’s playing a single very complicated computer game, whereas students socializing, reading reddit (at best) and trying to follow a lecture are engaged in a group of more discrete tasks that don’t feed together into a single overall mental process.

24

StevenAttewell 04.20.11 at 5:09 pm

I think the “multiple media” thing is a bit too broad – given that theater, opera, movies with sound, etc. are all bombarding you with at least two different mediums at any given time. In fact, I think there’s an argument to be made that “multi-experiencing” is something beyond the sum of its parts.

25

Sev 04.20.11 at 5:30 pm

Perhaps the exemplar of this would be the great jazz improvisers, since their integration is not only at a cognitive level, but also involves physical skill and effort, being emotionally attuned to the other performers and the audience, and an intuition of where the music is going, how to improve on that.

26

Omega Centauri 04.20.11 at 5:43 pm

In computing we have what is called a context switch, usually denoting something like a processor that was running one program has been yanked away to perform an unrelated task. As the CPU needs context (various data in its shortterm electronic state to compute), there is a cost to losing and having to restore this lost context before resuming. I think the human brain also has something similar to context, and being interrupted from a task, means the (brain’s) user must reestablish his thought patterns and short-term memory storage before resuming the original task.

Even for CPUs that are designed to interleave multiple threads of computation (hyperthreading) a lot of the CPUs resources must be shared (and coordinated) among the two or more tasks, which may or may not lead to greater throughput. A human who can truly multitask, must divide his limited shortterm memory among the various tasks, leading to decreased capabilty for each individual task. Again the sum of the parts may end up being less than the whole.

The most startling claim of the paper (I read Kevin’s review, not the original), was not that people suck at multi-taking, but that even after multitasking is over, multi-taskers are inferior at concentration on a single task. The thing this is hinting at, is that multitasking may be detraining the brain with respect to the ability to do deep thinking.

27

Sebastian 04.20.11 at 6:25 pm

RE: the reading/music thing, I find that listening to music helps my reading so long as I already know the music, and so long as it isn’t so loud as to demand active attention. I *believe* but cannot prove, that it engages a part of my brain that might otherwise be interested in other distractions. This makes it less likely that I will be actively distracted from the book.

I wonder if that concept applies to other multi-tasking concepts. You perform the one task worse than you would if you maintained sole attention to it, BUT for some tasks you can maintain enough attention to it for much longer if you are multi-tasking than you could if you were not multi-tasking.

28

Brautigan 04.20.11 at 6:37 pm

I seem to recall hearing about some research a number of years ago that found people scored better on intelligence tests if classical music was playing in the background.

29

LizardBreath 04.20.11 at 6:43 pm

I believe but cannot prove, that it engages a part of my brain that might otherwise be interested in other distractions.

Music doesn’t work that way for me — I’m either listening to it or not — but I’ve had the same thought about knitting and crocheting. They take up enough attention to prevent me from becoming distracted from listening to something dullish (say, a news podcast) but not enough to be distracting in themselves.

30

Barry Freed 04.20.11 at 7:22 pm

What, no love for Elisabeth Sladen RIP? Where’s Harry when you need him?

31

Barry Freed 04.20.11 at 7:25 pm

Ah, I see AcademicLurker @#6 beat me to it. Sorry for the hijack.

32

Randolph 04.20.11 at 7:45 pm

BTW, the more usual term for “single-tasking” is concentration. Which is a learned skill which demands practice.

In other news, water found to be wet.

33

bianca steele 04.20.11 at 7:54 pm

I suppose researchers must have found that people who have good posture and sit quietly, facing forward in the direction of the speaker (or directly in front of them in the case of reproduced speech), with their hands at rest on the tabletop in front of them, have the best comprehension and recall (without unwanted side effects).

Personally, I am finding that music is more distracting than it used to be, but that classical music helps me relax after a morning of shopping and listening to a toddler’s music. But I suppose you could say it lets me multitask meditation.

34

mpowell 04.20.11 at 8:17 pm

Vance @ 16:

I think you’re missing what I’m saying, which is what other people have emphasized as well. Certain jobs require the ability to absorb and process multiple inputs simultaneously. Some people are good at it. Maybe the right thing to say is that this isn’t multitasking. My model for what is going on is what Omega refers to in computing as context switching. I think the human mind is similar. If you have to perform a full context switch to go from one thing to another, you will not be able to do it efficiently. The way this is being described is that if you can process multiple inputs and incorporate them into one complex task you can make it work. What I don’t understand is why anyone thinks that the multiple threads you have to follow as a broker or as combat operations center manager are inherently related in a way that reading for one class while filtering a separate lecture for useful information would not be.

35

Jonathan Mayhew 04.20.11 at 9:40 pm

I was playing solitaire on the computer while also listening to a lecture on the same computer. The next day, I played solitaire again, and all the points of the lecture came flooding back to me. Another time I was doing a jigsaw puzzle while also watching Five Easy Pieces with Jack Nicholson. The next time I looked at the puzzle, I started to remember the entire movie in great detail. Hence a certain kind of multi-tasking helps me to retain material much better, at least as judged subjectively by me. Of course if I am concentrating on reading and listening to music at the same time, I not only don’t listen to it, but I almost don’t even hear it. It intrudes into my consciousness from time to time, as my attention wanes, but my ability to hear it is in inverse proportion to the level of my concentration.

On the other hand while driving I can focus completely on music and the road as well. When hearing the same radio program a second time in the car one day, I remembered exactly where I was on the road when I heard the same exact parts of the radio program.

I think, then, that some kind of brain activities are complementary and some are contradictory. True multi-tasking would be like trying to read two novels at the same time. It would be a great skill to have if you wanted to compare two narratives, but it doesn’t come naturally.

36

Vance Maverick 04.20.11 at 10:11 pm

mpowell, thanks for the clarification. I do take your point now.

What I don’t understand is why anyone thinks that the multiple threads you have to follow as a broker or as combat operations center manager are inherently related in a way that reading for one class while filtering a separate lecture for useful information would not be.

I don’t think anyone claims this. Rather, the synthesis of the points being made seems to be that some people are trained to follow certain sets of threads, and their skill at doing this is measured, and some turn out to be good at it. Meanwhile, untrained people who think they are good at following sets of threads in general turn out (on the whole) not to be.

37

Phil 04.20.11 at 11:04 pm

Wouldn’t that depend on whether the speaker coordinates the talk with the slides?

I saw a presentation that changed the way I think about using slides at my son’s school, of all places. The presenter put up a series of rather too wordy slides, and proceeded to cover all the points listed on each one of them – in different words and in a different order. The presentation would have made perfect sense transcribed without the slides; the slides would have been a fine reference for someone who hadn’t heard the presentation. Together they were overkill, but the right kind of overkill.

38

Neil 04.20.11 at 11:07 pm

It continues to surprise me that people talk about multitasking without realizing that psychology has been investigating it under the name cognitive load for 40 years. In short, anything that loads working memory leads to a decrement of performance at anything else that loads working memory. Not everything loads working memory: all kinds of tasks can become automated – like playing scales or riding a stationary bike. Anything requiring flexibility of response or unexpected contingencies does load working memory; so does stress and stereotype threat (actually stress might directly reduce working memory capacity, like alcohol, stereotype threat definitely loads it). Refs: oh, pretty much all of cogntivd and social psychology.

39

ScentOfViolets 04.21.11 at 1:30 am

Neil, yeah; amazing isn’t it how much one can deduce about the inner workings of the human mental machine from just a few clever low-tech and very non-invasive methods.

Does it? I thought it was mainly rediscovering Dunning-Kruger and pointing out that people who think they’re good at multitasking aren’t necessarily. Obviously, how often a person is likely to multitask has something to do with how good at it they think they are.

Here’s an oldie but goodie: it’s something of a shibboleth among a certain set to say they can read 1,000 or 2,000 or 5,000 wpm “with perfect comprehension”.[1] ‘Tain’t so, as numerous studies have shown, and what a moment’s thought should allow anyone to deduce.

Yes, you can objectively time these guys and see that they can finish a 10,000-word article in maybe five minutes, more or less. But they don’t comprehend that material and can answer only the most superficial questions. There was one incident where a self-proclaimed speed-reader bulled through x-thousands of words of text in maybe two minutes, and even answered a few questions correctly, which gave him an “adjusted” score of 20,000 wpm. What he never noticed, and what no one pointed out to him until after he got his number, was that the reading material was actually two completely separate articles, the odd-numbered lines being given over to one, the even-numbered lines to the other.

Of course, from the inside, it “felt” like he had that “100% comprehension”.

[1]They’re also perceptive enough to stay away from any claims of an extravagantly high I.Q. – but not much more perceptive. It’s a low bar to clear.

40

John Holbo 04.21.11 at 1:31 am

I think I might have made the post a tetch clearer by saying simply: studying multitasking by studying ‘high multitaskers’ – while excluding worked-to-distraction housewives and busy brokers from the set, so you are getting the iPhone fondlers only – seems perilously close to studying the relationship between heavy drinking and responsible drinking by sampling only alcoholics.

Phil: “the slides would have been a fine reference for someone who hadn’t heard the presentation. Together they were overkill, but the right kind of overkill.”

Do you think it actually worked, then?

Consider: Playing multiple chess games simultaneously. Obviously grandmasters are good at this. But it’s not really different in kind from just plain playing chess, which means keeping track of the possible moves of many pieces simultaneously. So if the former is multitasking, then just plain playing chess is multitasking? And if the latter is not, then the former is not? But if the former is not, then why isn’t it? And if playing several games of chess at once isn’t multitasking, then presumably a lot of other things that involve keeping several windows open on your desk at once isn’t multitasking either. Conceptual problem. (Other folks in the thread have been making more or less this point, from slightly different angles.)

What about learning limb independence. Two hands for pianists, four limbs for drummers? Multitasking? Presumably brokers and housewives and others who get good at juggling multiple tasks are doing something a bit similar? You can learn to do stuff without loading working memory.

41

Barry 04.21.11 at 10:54 am

To bring in an anecdote, a software blogger described an experiment where people were programming, in three environments: silence, loud distracting music, and quiet ‘good for concentration’ classical music. One of the tricks was that there were some buried traps in the instructions, such as to multiply a number by 1,000, and then later to do something which divided it by 1,000. Only the people in the silent environment spotted it; the people in the classical music environment all missed it.

The (anecdotal) conclusion was that music would still add a cognitive load, no matter what it was.

42

Mark 04.21.11 at 12:30 pm

How about using music to drown out the sound of the children? What is the lowdown on that?

43

chris 04.21.11 at 1:34 pm

Consider: Playing multiple chess games simultaneously. Obviously grandmasters are good at this.

But, IIRC, not as good as they are at playing a single game. That seems to reinforce the point about multitasking lowering performance rather than challenge it.

44

mpowell 04.21.11 at 2:40 pm

Okay, I think I understand the alcoholism comparison better now. So we have established that while the prototypical iphone multitasker is not doing anyone any favors, there is a dividing line somewhere where people who are properly trained can perform pretty complicated tasks effectively. I would like to see research that attempted to clearly define this difference because it could inform my own tasking decisions. Or in other words, how do I know how much alcohol is too much for me?

45

idlemind 04.21.11 at 6:41 pm

So, the problem with the iPhone fiddlers is that they lack the proper training to do so with minimal effect at other tasks?

46

idlemind 04.21.11 at 6:42 pm

(arg, “affect on” not “effect at.” OK, I’ve turned the music off.)

47

ScentOfViolets 04.21.11 at 6:56 pm

. So we have established that while the prototypical iphone multitasker is not doing anyone any favors, there is a dividing line somewhere where people who are properly trained can perform pretty complicated tasks effectively. I would like to see research that attempted to clearly define this difference because it could inform my own tasking decisions. Or in other words, how do I know how much alcohol is too much for me?

Pat your tummy and rub your head. Quick now, pat your head and rub your tummy. If you can do that – congratulations! You just may be a natural multitasker :-)

48

roac 04.21.11 at 7:03 pm

A chess master playing multiple opponents is not really playing them all simultaneously, but playing them one at a time in short increments. While looking at a board, he or she is concentrating on that board exclusively. But the master can, 95% of the time, deal with the situation on that board very quickly because he or she is perfectly familiar with the position and knows the best response. As the weaker players are defeated, the master has more and more time to react to the tougher players who are able to “take the game out of the book.”

An elite player playing “simultaneously” against 20 or 30 players on his or her level would be slaughtered by all of them.

49

ScentOfViolets 04.21.11 at 8:08 pm

A chess master playing multiple opponents is not really playing them all simultaneously, but playing them one at a time in short increments. While looking at a board, he or she is concentrating on that board exclusively.

What about something more real-life (and hence, presumably, more related to our evolved neural architecture), something like say, waiting tables or short-order cook? A head waitress who is also working her section at the same time she is dispensing instructions to her charges seems to be demonstrating a rather impressive level of multitasking. Perhaps not surprisingly, the good ones are worth their weight in gold (though of course they’re not paid anything like it; the standard perk seems to be being allowed to ride roughshod over all the other employees who aren’t actually management.)

50

Antisthenes IV 04.21.11 at 8:43 pm

Tom T @ 4
“I guess I wonder about selection bias and which way causation runs. By setting out to study “multi-taskers,” you’re likely to sweep in a lot of people with ADD, so you’re not studying normal brains. Instead, you’re seeing people whose abnormalities of cognitive function may be what’s causing them to multi-task.”

Or are you seeing people whose inability to concentrate has caused them to be ‘diagnosed’ as having ADD?

51

Sev 04.21.11 at 9:15 pm

#48 As the weaker players are defeated, the master has more and more time to react to the tougher players who are able to “take the game out of the book.”
Amusingly, it doesn’t always work that way. Andy Soltis years ago wrote about winning ‘by proxy’ – may have used a different phrase- in which x beats y who beats z, and who could make the most remarkable claims on that basis. I just may be that person. I am really a very weak player; for this reason my club champion probably paid little attention to our game(in a simul), which I then won. He similarly once defeated Kasparov, probably for like reasons.
As a multi-tasker subsumes the individual tasks into a more general one, s/he has to prioritize; details blur out at the margins- they may be barely aware of this, as in #41.
Re: speed reading, “I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” Woody Allen.

52

Main Street Muse 04.22.11 at 2:29 am

“But this seems misleading, because ‘task’ naturally covers cooking and kid-watching….

“(No one compulsively watches the kids while cooking. It never gets fun, per se.)”

Oh where do I begin?! Jack Welsh would agree that watching kids while cooking would be detrimental to the career. That’s because he had a large staff, including a wife, that propped up his ability to never have to worry about cooking, kids or anything other than his business.

Now if you have children but no gracious wife eager to assume all those domestic duties, multi-tasking is inevitable. Not ideal, of course. But inevitable. Perhaps we’re looking at the concrete components used to build that “glass ceiling.”

And if you are going to be engaged in reality, let’s agree that if you are answering emails while attending a lecture, you are not listening to the lecture. That’s not multi-tasking. That’s tuning out of one task to focus on the other…

53

Josh G. 04.22.11 at 5:23 pm

I’m not particularly impressed by the experimental design. It looks like what they did is throw a couple of unfamiliar tasks in front of the students (one task was to tell whether a colored rectangle was moving) and have them try to do them simultaneously. Of course if someone tries to multitask something they’re not used to, they aren’t going to be very good at it. That only shows, at most, that multitasking is not a good method in which to learn new tasks. It says nothing about whether people can effectively multitask when they already have individual mastery of each particular task involved.

54

Alex 04.23.11 at 9:58 pm

Those who man the combat operations centers of U.S. Navy ships use the term “having the bubble”

They had a linguistic template for it – the officer of the watch in a submarine has the bubble, being the bubble in a spirit level that shows the boat’s current trim.

55

John Holbo 04.24.11 at 3:59 am

Just to be clear about the chess example: I wasn’t suggesting that grandmaster are as good at playing 20 people at once than they are at playing 1. Rather, I was pointing out a potential unclarity in ‘multitasking’. There is a sense in which playing even one opponent is multitasking, because you are thinking about multiple pieces.

What’s the difference between doing one complex task and doing several simple tasks at once? Potentially a distinction without a difference.

56

adelady 04.24.11 at 9:07 am

Surely the difference with all of these is how much load is on short term / working memory. The cooking + watch children example becomes a lot more demanding if the cooking involves an unfamiliar recipe with many ingredients rather than the family favourite you could make in your sleep, i.e. well-established in long-term memory, minimal burden on attention or short-term memory.

Multi-tasking, what about air traffic controllers? I remember a friend sitting an initial test for ATC (long time ago). The paper was mainly maths and technical stuff, but what was really being tested was stamina and capacity to pay attention despite frequent interruptions and distractions – like having your pencil being taken away or loud noises behind you.

Same thing goes for the multi-taskers in the study. Their problem would mainly be the double whammy of mixing familiar with novel material – and kidding themselves they can learn / study material at the same time as constantly shifting attention to other matters.

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter0809/willingham.pdf .
There’s some useful stuff in here telling _all_ of us that we tend to overestimate what we know and how well we retain learned material.

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Kaleberg 04.25.11 at 4:17 am

Multitasking is an incredibly important skill, and requires a fair bit of learning and practice. An awful lot of task that we tend to think of as single tasks actually consist of a complicated set of parallel tasks. Consider driving. There is the steering task which is continuous, the braking/obstacle avoidance task, frequently an engine management task, and a navigational task. Consider cooking. Even a simple dish like spaghetti and meatballs requires monitoring at least two processes, the boiling water and the sauce with the meatballs. Consider studying. There is the problem being solved, the over all problem set, a focus on the problem’s relation to the course, and the numerous mechanical tasks of turning pages, keeping track of one’s pen, the problem sheet and so on.

As one gains experience with these tasks, one gets better at prioritizing and overlapping them. Young people tend to push their abilities in all areas as a means of learning how to do this. Sometimes the end result is a car crash. Sometimes it is just sending an embarrassing text message. Most people either improve their skills to a certain level or learn to back off a bit. No, you cannot play the violin and Halo at the same time, as tempting as it might be to do so. Older people have been whining about younger people experimenting and pushing their task management for thousands of years, just as they have been yelling “get off my lawn” since before anyone planted the first lawn.

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