Is constant Facebooking, Twittering, IMing taking its toll on attention spans?

According to a new study released by a group of Stanford University researchers Tuesday, people who regularly deal with several streams of electronic information simultaneously do not pay attention, control their memory, or switch from one job to another any better than those who prefer to complete one task at a time. Actually, they fare much worse.

The study, whose findings are published in the 24 August edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved about 100 students being put through three tests. In each, the researchers split participants into two groups: those who regularly do a lot of media multitasking and those who don't.

In one experiment, the groups were shown sets of two red rectangles. One showed the two rectangles alone, the other showed the two red rectangles surrounded by two, four or six blue rectangles. Each configuration was flashed twice, and the participants had to determine whether the two red rectangles in the second frame were in a different position than those in the first frame.

They were told to ignore the blue rectangles, and the low multitaskers had no problem doing that. The high multitaskers, on the other hand, were constantly distracted by the irrelevant blue images.

As multitaskers don't seem to ignore extra stimuli, researchers thought they would have good memories, which led to the second test involving remembering sequences of alphabetical letters. The result? The high multitaskers didn't do a great job of remembering when a letter was making a repeat appearance.

The last test was aimed at determining if multitaskers are good at switching from one task to another, which forms the basis of multitasking. Participants were shown images of letters and numbers at the same time and were instructed what to focus on. When they were told to pay attention to numbers, they had to determine if the digits were even or odd. When told to concentrate on letters, they had to say whether they were vowels or consonants.

Once again, the more the participants multitasked, the worse they did in this test, the study found.

In conclusion, the researchers realised those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price for their habits since everything appears to distract them.

The researchers are still trying to find out whether chronic media multitaskers are born with an inability to concentrate or pick up the habits and damage their cognitive control along the way. They are, however, convinced that the minds of multitaskers are not working as well as they could.

Original article: Habitual multitaskers do it badly, study shows from CNET News.com