Media multitaskers, people who try to use several devices at once, are not very skilled at tests of memory, attention and "task switching," according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers at Stanford University reported that the study of college students was surprising even to them, according to Reuters.
"They're terrible at multitasking," said Stanford's Dr. Clifford Nass.
The study also found that while having an array of devices may make multitasking more easy than in the past, it's not necessarily a good thing. The researchers said they had assumed that heavy multitaskers had some innate ability that allowed them to handle several tasks at once while filtering out environmental distractions.
The subjects were asked to perform a simple cognitive filtering test, to focus on the characteristics of a group of red triangles while ignoring a group of blue triangles. The end result: So-called multitaskers performed worse than people who were not regular media multitaskers, according to Reuters.
Similar findings occurred when the study participants took tests to measure organizational ability and task switching. Multitaskers were slower to shift their attention from one task to another.
The students were divided into groups based on how often they went online, watched TV, read, listened to music, e-mailed and text-messaged, and how often they did more than one of those things at the same time.
The reasons are not clear why heavy multitaskers are not good at multitasking, said Stanford's Nass.
He speculated that too many media distractions may be a cause, or people bad at multitasking could be more drawn to do it.
It's possible that heavy multitaskers could have an "exploratory" nature in that they like to gather information at the expense of performance of the task at hand.
In any case, Nass and his team had one piece of advice: "Heavy multitaskers should stop doing it. Society is developing tools all the time to make multitasking easier. The question is whether that's a good thing."
