In the 21st century, where technology plays a vital role in our life, it is no wonder that people have multiple tabs open in computer and doing work, chatting with friend and following on news all at the same time. Many people believe that they can multitask and they are great at it. But is it the case, where you can pay same attention while doing homework and chatting with your friend and listening to music. Is it the case where the entire task above is done with same concentration and focus, if they are done individually? To understand this better, a research study was conducted by Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner, to see the results on cognitive control in media multitaskers. Firstly, they gave a two hundred sixty-two university …show more content…
To measure this there were three tests were given to the participants. In part 1, the goal was to see filtering ability that allows to breadth orientation into working memory. In this part, the participants were to ask to view two consecutive exposures of an array of rectangles and had to indicate whether the orientation of red rectangle had changed its orientation from the first it was showed (Ophir et al ., 2009). Addition to this decision making the participants had to ignore blue rectangles. The result for this was that HMMs performance was linearly negative because of distractors, whereas LMMs were unaffected by distractors. This can be concluded that LMMs have an ability to filter out irrelevant stimuli. For further evidence, an addition task under the same category was done; the goal in this was whether LMMs and HMMs differ in their representation and maintenance of context (Ophir et al ., 2009). In this participants had to focus for the probe pair of letters AX and had to ignore any other probe pair letters such as BX, AY, BY, those probe pair need to respond as no, whereas AX need to answer Yes. Along with this identification of probe letter, there were distractors of colors in the letters, in this participants were to ignore letters marked as distractors and perform task as if they did not exist. The results for this task were HMMs were slower compared to LMMs to respond with AX trials. Therefore, for this part of filtering environment distractors it was concluded that HMMs are very less selective in allowing information into working memory and are more affected by distractors (Ophir et al .,
As human beings, it is becoming more of a second nature to us to multi-task. As the world is technologically advancing more and more every day, there are becoming more distractions. Social-media is flourishing, reality TV show ratings are going up, and humans even unintentionally check their phones every two minutes. In this day of age, multi-tasking is proving to promote inefficiency rather than productivity.
In the chapter “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era,” from The New Brain, written by Richard Restak, Restak makes some very good points on his view of multitasking and modern technology. He argues that multitasking is very inefficient and that our modern technology is making our minds weaker. Multitasking and modern technology is causing people to care too much what other people think of them, to not be able to focus on one topic, and to not be able to think for themselves.
In the article,“Multitasking is actually kind of a problem for kids and adults” by Hayley Tsukayama the author went into detail about how parents and their children view their personal media habits. One of the ways that the parents and children viewed their media habits as was feeling the need to respond to texts and notifications immediately. “More than 1,200 parents and teens surveyed, 48 percent of parents and 72 percent of teens said they felt the need to respond to texts and notifications immediately, almost guaranteeing distractions throughout the day” (Tsukayama). This article can be connected to “The Epidemic of Media Multitasking While Learning” both of the articles discussed the different factors of media multitasking among individuals. The article from The Washington Post website gave great insight on multitasking and rather it is bad for students when it comes to learning. I believe that the issue being discussed is very relevant because if students are easily distracted by technology while in their learning environment it results in them not learning
Many would remark that multitasking is a skill that can be trained like all others. However, a lot of neuroscience has went into proving that multitasking is a myth altogether. The article “The Myth of Multitasking” is written by Nancy K. Napier for Psychology today is here to debunk the myth of the brain’s capability to multitask. The article states that the brain is incapable of doing two things at once. Instead, the way that we fool ourselves into thinking that we can multitask is how quickly our brain switches from one task to another. Our brains can’t perform tasks simultaneously as our focus is a narrow beam. So, to compensate for this, our brain switches between these two tasks very quickly, almost as if we are doing them at the same
Today’s society moves way faster then it used to move. Now a day’s people want to move faster and get things done a lot easier by doing such things at the same time. There are many incidents where people tend to multitask and in some ways there are positives to multitasking and some are negatives to multitasking. Multitasking concerns a lot of college students, due to not having enough time or just trying to finish more than one thing at a time. But the real question is how does multitasking actually affect us? What happens to our mind and brain while we multitask? While trying to finish multiple things at one time we tend to do them sluggishly and poorly, which makes it double the work. Even though multitasking can help save a lot of time but it also affects college students brain and can eventually cause health related problems.
In Alina Tugend’s article “Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus,” the New York Times columnist shares with her readers her point of view on the concept of multitasking. From the 1990’s to today, technology has created a chaotic world where tasks are expected to be accomplished in a shorter time span, causing people to feel the urge to multitask. The columnist refutes that multitasking does not work by listing research from neuroscientists and psychologists; their findings correlated to an increase in stress, frustration, as well as pressure when one is attempting various tasks at once, arguing the effort to multitask is condemned an “attention deficit trait.” Tugend argues that with multitasking, the brain tries to focus on more than one
According to Baddeley and Hitch (1974) what constitutes as working memory can be divided into four distinct components which contribute to the processes of memory. They are the phonological loop, the visual spatial sketchpad, the episodic buffer and the central executive (in Passer, Smith, Holt, Bremner, Vliek, 2009).
In “The Myth of Multitasking”, Christine Rosen argues that multitasking has become the normal way of doing things for many people and there are many side effects from multitasking. Many people believe that multitasking is a skill, but multitasking is in fact just dangerous. Multitasking has changed today’s society because more people are texting and driving, distracted for longer periods of time, cannot retrieve information, and attention spans are weaker. If more people took their time and paid attention to how they complete a task the first time then things could get done quicker instead of trying to do too many things at one time. In conclusion, multitasking is based on how much a person pays attention while doing a task and in today’s society is it harder for people to pay attention for long periods of time.
Socchia, et al. (2012), conducted two different experiments to see if there was any relationship between orientation of an object and working memory. For the first experiment, the participants had two separate tasks to complete. In the first task, the participants were shown a Gabor patch to memorize and then had to correctly remember the position (Socchia, Cicchini, & Triesch, 2012). The purpose of the second task was for participants had to carefully look at the stimuli and notice any changes. Researchers found the participants were able to perform the task sufficiently (Socchia, et al., 2012). The reason for conducting the following experiment was to see if the first experiment was affected by the participant’s cognition (Socchia, et al., 2012). Researchers, had recruited new participants and changed the look of the stimulus. For the second task, the participants had to use their left hand to indicate when the Gabor patch changed in contrast (Socchia, et al., 2012, p. 52). The results of the second experiment were close to the results of the...
Students may easily lose their attention and concentration with easy access to such incredibly rich store of information. With such new technologies as television, internet and social networks, people nowadays tend to multitask more often as they have easy access to a large amount of information. However, such easy access may sometimes be a distraction. Study “Your Brain on Computers” reports that heavy multitaskers perform up to 20% worse on most tests compared to performance of light multitaskers. Working efficiency of people, who multitask, is claimed to be significantly lower. The same is with concentration. (Crovitz 353) As a result, they are not engaged in working process. Students tend to be easily distr...
In the article, “Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus,” Alina Tugend centralizes around the negative effects of multitasking. She shows that often with multitasking, people tend to lose focus, lack work quality, have an increase in stress, and in the end she gives a solution to all these problems. Tugend conveys her points by using understandable language, a clear division of subjects, and many reliable sources, making her article cogent.
Multitasking requires that a worker divides his/her time and energy on multiple tasks at the same time. As a result, the care and attention to detail is divided. The amount of focus that could be used to review one assignment is split. In an experiment, Patterson (2017) discovered that students who studied while participating in media multitasking took longer to complete tasks in their classes. This experiment addresses media multitasking in the case of students. While it is not a type of multitasking we normally consider, it does involve performing multiple tasks at one. Instead of putting all of their focus on their assignments, these students’ attention is on the assignment and on their social media. The results of the experiment prove that it when placed in scenarios where people are required to focus on multiple things, it takes more time to complete certain tasks. In this instance, media multitasking caused a decrease in performance. In another experiment, Paridon and Kaufmann (2010) made an observation when studying multitasking in the workplace, stating that people’s reaction time diminished when multiple tasks were completed at once. The believe that multitasking affects people’s performance has also been proven to be true in the workplace, as the speed of people’s production when down when required to complete multiple tasks. Performance can be determined by the speed in which a task is completed.
Students, who have been chosen by their perceived ability to multitask, are asked to “identify whether numbers are odd or even, letters as vowels or consonants” while dealing with constant distractions (qtd. in Digital Nation). Furthermore, Nass shows that while people may believe they can multitask, it is simply not possible. After Dretzin and Rushkoff discuss technology in their own lives, they meet with the only neuroscientist to examine the effects of the Internet on the brain.
Technology has been always improving over the decades, and now it has improved to the point where it’s a part of a human being’s life. People can’t imagine living without technology anymore nowadays, and especially college students who are always on their phones and laptops during lectures. That leads to what is known as multitasking, which is the ability to take care of more than one task at the same time. Multitasking has been popularized by students, and specifically college students who think that they are actually successful at doing it. Unfortunately, according to Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, after testing students who think they are brilliant at multitasking, results showed that they are terrible at every aspect of multitasking; consequently, it is not successful.
Multitasking with non-course material results in a student’s attention being diverted from the course material that is being taught. This can result in errors in memory for the student and also a more difficult time learning the information outside of the classroom (Kraushaar & Novak, 2010, p.1). The University of Vermont completed a study in order to determine the impacts of multitasking with a laptop during a university lecture. Through the experiment they were able to determine that “students with a high [and long] frequency of software multitasking during lectures will exhibit lower academic performance than students with a low [and short] frequency of software multitasking” (Kraushaar & Novak, 2010, p.6). This shows that repeated and lengthy multitasking with technology in particular laptops during lecture times can cause extremely negative results in a students academic performances and