Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows | Stanford Report

Stanford Study: The Cognitive Cost of Media Multitasking

• Core Finding: Frequent media multitaskers perform worse than those who focus on one task at a time in areas of attention, memory, and task-switching.
• Key Researchers: Clifford Nass (Communication), Eyal Ophir (Lead Author), and Anthony Wagner (Psychology) from Stanford University.
• Publication: Findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (August 24).
• Study Methodology: Researchers compared "high" and "low" media multitaskers across three specific cognitive tests using approximately 100 student subjects.
• Test 1 (Filtering Irrelevancy): High multitaskers struggled to ignore irrelevant stimuli (blue rectangles) compared to low multitaskers, who filtered them out easily.
• Test 2 (Memory): High multitaskers performed poorly at tracking repeating letters in a sequence, showing an inability to organize information effectively in their working memory.
• Test 3 (Task-Switching): High multitaskers were slower and less efficient at switching between tasks (e.g., identifying odd/even numbers vs. vowels/consonants) because they could not effectively ignore the "inactive" task.
• Conclusion: High multitaskers are "suckers for irrelevancy"; they are unable to filter out distractions, which slows down their cognitive processing.
• Open Question: Researchers are currently investigating whether chronic multitasking causes cognitive damage or if individuals with lower cognitive control are naturally drawn to multitasking.