14 DAY TRIAL // Ohio State University (OSU) recently took a look at people's ability to multi-task, and discovered a series of worrying trends, as well as potential approaches to addressing them. The investigators say that certain types of multi-tasking are more harmful than others, while some can be practiced safely.
Most people are no strangers to the fact that multi-tasking can go horribly wrong. Driving while texting or talking to other people on the phone is a good example, but there are many others that an extremely large number of people apply in the workplace, for example, every single day.
Since there are those who argue that some types of multi-tasking are more dangerous than others, experts decided to set out and investigate whether that's actually the case. They established that popular wisdom on this issue is true.
For example, performing two tasks that demand visual attention at the same time is very inefficient, and only marginally effective, at best. On the other hand, performing an auditory and a visual task at the same time may pose no threat to the completion of either one.
Interestingly, when multi-taskers themselves were asked about their performances, those who carried out two visual tasks simultaneously reported improved performances, even though objective test results showed an overall decrease in efficiency.
The same people also rated their performances as better than that of individuals who performed auditory and visual tasks at the same time. In fact, people in the second group were more efficient.
“Many people have this overconfidence in how well they can multitask, and our study shows that this particularly is the case when they combine two visual tasks. People’s perception about how well they’re doing doesn’t match up with how they actually perform,” researcher Zheng Wang explains.
Wang, who is based at OSU, is also the lead author of the new study, details of which appear in a recent issue of the esteemed journal Computers in Human Behavior. Want says that completing two visual tasks at once significantly distracts visual attention, as measured with eye-tracking cameras.
“They’re both dangerous, but as both our behavioral performance data and eyetracking data suggest, texting is more dangerous to do while driving than talking on a phone, which is not a surprise,” the team leader adds, quoted by PsychCentral.
“But what is surprising is that our results also suggest that people may perceive that texting is not more dangerous – they may think they can do a good job at two visual tasks at one time,” he concludes.