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Media multitasking behavior: concurrent television and computer usage.

ABSTRACT: Changes in the media landscape have made simultaneous usage of the computer and television increasingly commonplace, but little research has explored how individuals navigate this media multitasking environment. Prior work suggests that self-insight may be limited in media consumption and multitasking environments, reinforcing a rising need for direct observational research. A laboratory experiment recorded both younger and older individuals as they used a computer and television concurrently, multitasking across television and Internet content. Results show that individuals are attending primarily to the computer during media multitasking. Although gazes last longer on the computer when compared to the television, the overall distribution of gazes is strongly skewed toward very short gazes only a few seconds in duration. People switched between media at an extreme rate, averaging more than 4 switches per min and 120 switches over the 27.5-minute study exposure. Participants had little insight into their switching activity and recalled their switching behavior at an average of only 12 percent of their actual switching rate revealed in the objective data. Younger individuals switched more often than older individuals, but other individual differences such as stated multitasking preference and polychronicity had little effect on switching patterns or gaze duration. This overall pattern of results highlights the importance of exploring new media environments, such as the current drive toward media multitasking, and reinforces that self-monitoring, post hoc surveying, and lay theory may offer only limited insight into how individuals interact with media.

SUBMITTER: Brasel SA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3171998 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:The effect of media multitasking (e.g., listening to podcasts while studying) on cognitive processes has seen mixed results thus far. To date, the tasks used in the literature to study this phenomenon have been classical paradigms primarily used to examine processes such as working memory. While perfectly valid on their own, these paradigms do not approximate a real-world volitional multitasking environment. To remedy this, as well as attempt to further validate previously found effects in the literature, we designed a novel experimental framework that mimics a desktop computer environment where a "popup" associated with a secondary task would occasionally appear. Participants could choose to attend to the popup, or to ignore it. Attending to the popup would prompt a word stem completion task, while ignoring it would continue the primary math problem verification task. We predicted that individuals who are more impulsive, more frequent media multitaskers, and individuals who prefer to multitask (quantified with the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, a modified version of the Media Use Questionnaire, and the Multitasking Preference Inventory) would be more distracted by popups, choose to switch tasks more often and more quickly, and be slower to return to the primary task compared to those who media multitask to a lesser degree. We found that as individuals media multitask to a greater extent, they are slower to return to the previous (primary) task set and are slower to complete the primary task overall whether a popup was present or not, among other task performance measures. We found a similar pattern of effects within individuals who prefer to multitask. Our findings suggest that overall, more frequent media multitaskers show a marginal decrease in task performance, as do preferential multitaskers. Attentional impulsivity was not found to influence any task performance measures, but was positively related to a preference for multitasking. While our findings may lack generalizability due to the modifications to the Media Use Questionnaire, and this initial study is statically underpowered, this paradigm is a crucial first step in establishing a more ecologically valid method to study real-world multitasking.

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Media multitasking behavior: concurrent television and computer usage.

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