Way back in July of 2009 (that's almost 15 years ago now) a study was published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a well-respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal. The study was called
Cognitive control in media multitaskers.
This is a very early study looking at the effects of multitasking on the human brain and productivity. There's certainly been more research on this subject in recent years but it's interesting to see how far back understanding of this problem goes.
The basic purpose of the study is explained where it says:
"A series of experiments addressed whether there are systematic differences in information processing styles between chronically heavy and light media multitaskers."
What did the study's findings show?
Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set.
That's from the abstract at the top of the page, but if you want to delve more deeply into the methodology and results, there's quite a bit of info below.
So nothing too surprising, but it's certainly interesting to see this kind of thing examined back in 2009.
Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!
