Human multitasking is the concept that one can split their attention on more than one task or activity at the same time, such as speaking on the phone while driving a car. Multitasking can result in time wasted due to human context switching (e.g., determining which step is next in the task just switched to) and becoming prone to errors due to insufficient attention. Some people may be proficient at the tasks in question, able to rapidly shift attention between the tasks, and thus able to perform the tasks well. However, self-perception of being good at multitasking or getting more done while multitasking is frequently inaccurate. Multitasking is mentally and physically stressful for everyone, to the point that multitasking is used in laboratory experiments to study stressful environments. Research suggests that people who are multitasking in a learning environment are worse at learning new information compared to those who do not have their attention divided among different tasks.
Etymology The first published use of the word "multitask" appeared in an IBM paper describing the capabilities of the IBM System/360 in 1965. The term has since been applied to human tasks.
Research Since the 1960s, psychologists have conducted experiments on the nature and limits of human multitasking. The simplest experimental design used to investigate human multitasking is the so-called psychological refractory period effect. Here, people are asked to make separate responses to each of two stimuli presented close together in time. An extremely general finding is a slowing in responses to the second-appearing stimulus. This slowing is intuitively apparent even in certain simple game-like contexts. Researchers have long suggested that there appears to be a processing bottleneck preventing the brain from working on certain key aspects of both tasks at the same time (e.g., (Gladstones, Regan & Lee 1989) (Pashler 1994)). Bottlenecking refers to the idea that because people only have a limited amount of attentional resources, the most important information is kept. Many researchers believe that the cognitive function subject to the most severe form of bottlenecking is the planning of actions and retrieval of information from memory. Psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell has gone so far as to describe multitasking as a "mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one." Others have researched multitasking in the area of learning. Richard E Mayer and Roxana Moreno studied the phenomenon of cognitive load in multimedia learning and concluded that it is difficult, if not impossible, to learn new information while engaging in multitasking. Reynol Junco (and Shelia R Cotten Archived August 1, 2020, at the Wayback Machine ) examined how multitasking affects academic success and found that students who engaged in high levels of multitasking reported significant issues with their academic work. A more recent study on the effects of multitasking on academic performance showed that using Facebook and text messaging while studying were negatively related to student grades, while online searching and emailing were not. Some experiments have been done that demonstrate that it is possible to divide one's attention among several tasks; how successfully depends on several factors such as how much practice one has with it or the difficulty of the task. Walter Schneider and Robert Shiffrin performed an experiment in which they presented the participants with a memory set, which consisted of target stimuli such as the number three. After being presented with the memory set they were rapidly shown 20 test frames that contained distractor stimuli. One of the slides they were shown contained one of the target stimuli from the memory set. With each trial, a new memory set and new test frames were presented. At the start of the experiment, participants averaged 55% in correctly identifying the target stimuli from the memory set. After 900 trials the participants were able to bring the average up to 90%. They reported that after about 600 trials the task became automatic and they were able to respond without thinking about it.
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