Tim Hartford’s interesting FT piece on multitasking:
Hartford notes -
“Three
psychologists, Karin Foerde, Barbara Knowlton and Russell Poldrack, recruited
students to look at a series of flashcards with symbols on them, and then to
make predictions based on patterns they had recognised. Some of these
prediction tasks were done in a multitasking environment, where the students
also had to listen to low- and high-pitched tones and count the high-pitched
ones. You might think that making predictions while also counting beeps was too
much for the students to handle. It wasn’t. They were equally competent at
spotting patterns with or without the note-counting task. But here’s the
catch: when the researchers then followed up by asking more abstract questions
about the patterns, the cognitive cost of the multitasking became clear. The
students struggled to answer questions about the predictions they’d made in the
multitasking environment. They had successfully juggled both tasks in the
moment — but they hadn’t learnt anything that they could apply in a different
context.That’s an unnerving
discovery. When we are sending email in the middle of a tedious meeting, we may
nevertheless feel that we’re taking in what is being said. A student may be
confident that neither Snapchat nor the live football is preventing them taking
in their revision notes. But the UCLA findings suggest that this feeling of
understanding may be an illusion and that, later, we’ll find ourselves unable
to remember much, or to apply our knowledge flexibly. So, multitasking can make
us forgetful — one more way in which multitaskers are a little bit like drunks.”