Ask people if they are good at multitasking and chances are they’ll say “yes”. Two things to note about this:
- Multitasking doesn’t exist – the human brain can’t do two cognitively demanding tasks simultaneously. Humans can task switch but not multitask.
- Most people over-index their ability to task-switch. By a lot.
Any time multiple demands compete for attention (interference) we have to devote resources to orient ourselves to the new task. And that orientation incurs a cognitive and metabolic hit. Consider this process that happens every time we switch tasks:
GOAL SHIFTING
1 – Stop the current task
2 – Search for information about the new task
RULE ACTIVATION
1 – Find new task parameters
2 – Engage in the new task
Sure, this process can be speedy (maybe only a few tenths of a second) but over time those costs add up – and that’s just the time penalty. Interrupting deep focus can damage memory and learning. In a study that examined divided attention while retrieving information participants with divided attention performed roughly 42% worse than participants in the full attention group. That is the difference between an A and an F ! And while that study may be a specific case, there is a mountain of research demonstrating the abject failure of “multitasking”.
As you are having conversations about “multitasking” with your learners, here are a few studies that you might share to illustrate how subtly dangerous “multitasking” is.
The Breakfast Bowl Study
In this study participants had to classify sentences as coherent (“This morning I had a bowl of cereal”) or nonsensical (“This morning I had a bowl of shoes”). The first group had no distractions, the second group had to focus on a sentence (got to choose between written or spoken), and the third group had to sort two sentences at the same time (one written and one spoken).
The unimodal condition participants scored around 98% accuracy. The selective attention conditions group scored a 95%. The third group, divided attention, scored a meager 90%.
On sorting sentences like “I had a bowl of shoes”.
Cognitively speaking, this is not a terribly demanding task and there was an 8% drop!
You can also point to the study (Microsoft was one of the researchers) that showed just how much time was lost to alerts from emails and instant messages. The study found that “participants spent on average another 10 to 15 minutes (depending on the type of interruption) before returning to focused activity on the disrupted task.” But what is even more interesting is how the participants mis-indexed their ability:
Users spend more time than they realize responding to alerts. Even though users feel that they are in control of when they switch tasks due to an alert, they appear to be largely unaware of the amount of time they end up spending on the alerting application, on other tasks they invoke as a result of responding to the alert, and on browsing through other peripheral applications before resuming the suspended task. Even when users respond immediately with the intention of resuming the suspended current task as soon as possible, they often end up taking significantly more time to return than the time to respond.
You can also remind your learners that there is no evidence to suggest that “digital natives” perform any better with digital task switching than “digital immigrants”.
ABCs
There are two things you can do with your learners to evangelize the dangers of “multitasking”.
Ask a learner to count, out loud, from 1 to 20. Time them as they count. Then, ask that learner to rip through the alphabet as fast as they can – and time that, too (thanks to Paul for suggesting introducing time into this).
Here’s where the showpersonship comes in. Remind everyone watching that these silly tasks (that they have been doing most of their lives) took mere seconds.
Then ask the learner to toggle between letters and numbers (“A”, “1”, “B”, “2”, “C”, “3”…). Most people fall apart before “J” – and even if they get that far, it demands much more time and focus than either task done by itself. You can even have everyone in the class do this at their seats (or in front of their computers). Tell your learners to mouth out what they are saying even if they aren’t vocalizing.
Another activity you can do is to show a slide like this one and ask someone to read it. Have them say the color, not the word:
You can download a color version here and a black & white version here
This is also an opportune time to talk about how color should never be the primary way to convey information – this activity is not accessible to people who are colorblind.
McDonald’s
Let’s close with another analogy. Again from our friend Stanislas Dehaene and one of his books How we Learn. In it, he talks about a study where participants had to press a key with their left hand whenever they heard a high-pitched sound and a key with their right hand if they saw the letter “Y” appear on a monitor. When the events happen at the same time, there is a lag in the reaction time. Our global workspace can only contend with one task at a time. I liken this to working at a drive thru at McDonald’s. When the person taking the order finishes up and that car moves forward, the next car in line moves up to the microphone. Note the dual-reality here. The employee who is taking the orders has no idea if the new car just drove up or if they were waiting for a long time – in fact, they might not even know how long the line is. Their perspective is that they are handling orders one at a time as quick as possible whereas the reality of everyone else is witnessing gigantic waits and long lines.
This is why people mis-index their ability to “multitask”. Even if tasks are competing for our attention and lining up just like those cars, we don’t notice. Dehaene concludes by saying, “Remarkably, however, none of us is aware of this large dual-task delay—because, by definition, we cannot be aware of information before it enters our conscious workspace” (page 161).
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
