Studies on Multitasking Highlight Value of Self-Control

For a generation of children immersed in technology, emerging research suggests that while the temptation to multitask may be pervasive, the ability to control it could be the real bellwether of academic success.

Those under 18 multitask more often and more extensively than previous generations, says Larry D. Rosen, the author of the 2012 book iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us. On average, he found, 13- to 18-year-olds use more than six types of media simultaneously during out-of-school time.

The pervasiveness of technology and social media, coupled with a fear of missing out on something important, has led students to pay "continuous partial attention" to everything, but has resulted in their having difficulty concentrating deeply on anything, according to Mr. Rosen and other researchers who took part in the Web-Connected Minds Conference, held near Washington this month.

They highlighted emerging research on the way the brain copes with doing too much.

Brain Reaction Time

Simply put, the brain can't be in two places at once.

High Multitaskers Perform Poorly

Just because students think they are great multitaskers doesn't mean they can juggle many tasks at once, as a study published in theProceedings of the National Academy shows. Researchers tested "low" and "high" multitaskers among college students identified based on the number of different media they reported regularly using simultaneously.

SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy

Not only can people not process two tasks simultaneously, but it also takes longer to multitask than it would to do the individual tasks one after the other, according to Steven G. Yantis, the chairman of the psychological and brain sciences department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

It's fine to walk and chew gum at the same time, but when a person tries to do two things at the same time that each require a choice, there's a brief "bottleneck" in the prefrontal cortex—the decisionmaking part of the brain—that delays the second task, he said.

In most situations, that delay is only milliseconds long. Yet the newer the task, the more dynamic the environment, and the more intense the distraction, the longer it will take the brain to react.

In the case of an adolescent driver, Mr. Yantis said he found that texting could slow reaction time by a full second, which at high speed is "halfway into the trunk of the car in front of you."

In education, that delay can cause students to miss information or simply fail to fully take it in. Research shows teachers shouldn't necessarily take students' word for it that having multiple media helps, rather than hurts, their concentration.

In a landmark 2009 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford University researchers compared the attention-switching abilities of people who said they multitasked often with those of people who did so rarely. It found that the frequent multitaskers were more easily distracted and performed worse on memory and attention tests than those who preferred to do one thing at a time.

"There appears to be an intrinsic, structural aspect of brain function that prevents perfect task-sharing," Mr. Yantis said at the May 4-6 conference, which was held in ...

Click here to continue reading.