Heavy and light media multitaskers employ different neurocognitive strategies in a prospective memory task: An ERP study

Abstract

Multitasking with several media streams is pervasive. Converging studies have investigated whether and how frequent media multitasking affects cognition. The present study explored the potential behavioral and neurocognitive differences between heavy media multitaskers (HMM) and light media multitaskers (LMM) in prospective memory (PM). The event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded the prospective memory task's underlying processes. Participants needed to perform a PM task (detecting the PM cue and retrieving the PM intention) during an ongoing task. The behavioral results showed a comparable accuracy but a faster response time for HMM than for LMM. ERP results revealed that the two groups employed different neurocognitive strategies. HMM recruited more cognitive resources to monitor the occurrence of the PM cue, whereas LMM spontaneously detected the PM cue when it appeared. Moreover, HMM allocated equivalent cognitive resources for information retrieval in the PM and ongoing trials, whereas LMM could concentrate on the PM trials. The results supported the scattered attention hypothesis and the trained attention hypothesis and indicated that HMM employed a more resource-demanding strategy than LMM. Moreover, our results suggest that the neurocognitive investigations could serve as valuable supplements to behavioral results.