Does Media Multitasking Always Hurt?

Abstract

Chronic heavy media multitaskers have been found impaired cognitive performance on certain cognitive tasks (Ophir, Nass & Wagner, 2009). However, the poor performance may be caused by their breadth-biased style of cognitive control rather than a deficit in cognitive abilities such as the ability to filter out interference from irrelevant stimuli and representations in memory. In this study, a new media multitasking index was invented to differentiate heavy and light media multitaskers by adding three open ended questions to the Media Use Questionnaire used by Ophir, Nass and Wagner (2009). Also, four different cognitive tasks, which access the ability of attentional capture, attention allocation to infrequent information, task switching and crossmodal integration, were used to investigate whether the poor performance of heavy media multitaskers is general to a wider range of tasks. Preliminary results found that heavy media multitaskers showed better improvement in accuracy between the sound present condition and sound absent condition of Pip and Pop Task (Van der Burg, Olivers, Bronkhorst, & theeuwes, 2008). Heavy media multitaskers appeared to have better ability of crossmodal integration than light medie multitaskers; hence, their poor performance is limited in only certain cognitive tasks.