Essay On Light Multitasking

The art of balancing multiple tasks at the same time, especially in college, has increasingly become a requirement in order to finish work on time. We have come to understand this ability as “multitasking”. However, researchers have discovered the evidence of multitasking to indicate that it is a rather inefficient and impairing bond to cognitive functioning. In a 2009 study, Stanford researcher Clifford Nass and his colleagues put the question to the test- does multitasking benefit or hinder cognitive performance? They began the experiment by establishing two groups: those who identify themselves as “heavy multitaskers” and those who do not or rarely multitask “light multitaskers”; both groups ranged between 18 and 23 years of age. The researchers had a sample size of 262 coed college students to choose from for tasks ranging from performing multiple tasks simultaneously, filtering unrelated material, and utilizing working memory (Naas and colleagues).
Naas and his colleague’s methodology for going about the study were divided into five parts: a media use questionnaire and index, three sets of cognitive …show more content…
To their amazement, they witnessed the opposite- heavy multitaskers performed worse than the light multitaskers on all three tasks (Naas and colleagues). Interestingly enough, only one of the experiments involved actively multitasking. Their results illustrated that heavy multitaskers have an increased susceptibility in their cognitive control abilities from avoidable environmental stimuli and from irrelevant distractions in memory. Heavy multitaskers demonstrated a reduced ability in filtering out interference from each task set, something that light multitaskers were able to. Therefore, media multitasking establishes a positive correlation with a deficiency in fundamental information processing (Naas and