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Key points
- People can develop some skills in tracking multiple things, but they also train themselves to be distracted.
- When people multitask, one activity may go on autopilot, taking less attention and occurring without awareness.
- When people multitask, they are often unaware of the errors they may be making.
Are you an expert in multitasking? Do you regularly track multiple things? Do you drive with your cell phone or study with the TV on? Can we get good at multitasking?
Multitaskers and People Who Focus
Many people frequently multitask. Others prefer to focus their attention whenever possible. You can see the difference in how their computer screens look. Just how many windows do you have open? And are some of those open windows unrelated to the primary task on which you’re working? If you are studying, how much do you have happening in the background? Do you have music playing or the TV on?
Practice, Expertise, and Automaticity
With practice, we can become experts at a variety of tasks. With practice, you’ve hopefully become a more proficient driver. You are now able to track multiple sources of information to guide your car carefully down the road. You can even have some other tasks running while driving—such as listening to the radio or talking with a passenger. With your expertise, driving has become automatic. Automatic means it takes less attention capacity and you can do parts of it without intention—it just happens.
You’re probably also an expert reader. Reading is now automatic for you. When there are words in front of you, you start to read. The classic example of this is the Stroop Test. See the example in the picture at left. In the Stroop Test, your task is to name the ink colors. To do that, you must ignore the words. But reading is automatic, so you frequently read the word instead of naming the colors. You make errors. You slow down compared to a version without words.
Multitasking and Going on Autopilot
Multitasking is something we can often do, especially when one of the activities can be automatic – like driving or reading. And this highlights the problem with multitasking: When one task can become automatic, we often let it go on autopilot. For example, when people walk while using their cell phones, they may avoid obstacles but not realize that they’ve done so; they have no memory of things they moved to avoid (Hyman et al., 2014).
With driving, it can mean having our attention focused on a cell phone conversation. The conversation requires careful attention and thoughtful consideration. To manage it, we devote less attention to driving, and our autopilot kicks in. In this context, we may fail to see things. But we can think we are driving very well. We make more errors while using a cell phone, but our assessment is that we are doing a great job. When we aren’t on our phone, our assessment of our driving performance is more accurate (Sanbonmatsu, Strayer, Biondi, Behrends, & Moore, 2015). You can drive while multitasking. But you are likely to go on autopilot and be unaware of any errors that you make.
Going on Autopilot While Reading
Oddly, reading can work the same way: You can read while other things happen around you. Maybe you’ve got a show on the TV. But the TV show may start to attract your attention. In that situation, reading may go on autopilot. Your eyes follow the lines, and maybe even you turn the page. But eventually, you realize you have no idea what you’ve been reading! This is often called mind-wandering. Your mind moved away from what you considered your primary task. You then must back up to find the place in your book where you last were effectively tracking the content before you went on autopilot with your reading.
I describe this to my students when trying to convince them to study in more quiet environments. They nod their heads. But they often return to multitasking while studying, to their own detriment.
Experts in Multitasking
Yes, you can multitask. But if one of the activities can become automatic, it often will. This can allow you to get more done. But it also means you’ll drive poorly and not recognize that you’re doing so. It will mean that you read without awareness, and then have to re-read. There’s a cost to multitasking.
But there is one thing that people who frequently multitask develop excellent skills at doing—becoming distracted by irrelevant things around them. In a nice investigation of this, Ophir, Nass, and Wagner (2009) compared people who frequently multitask with others who rarely do so. Ophir and colleagues gave them a focused attention task to perform. The interesting aspect was the presence of unrelated distractors during the task.
People who more often reported multitasking were more likely to be disrupted by unrelated stimuli than people who multitasked less often. In essence, multitaskers have trained themselves to be easily distracted. They are skilled at having their attention captured by new things around them. The other participants were better at staying focused. People who don’t multitask as often are skilled at staying focused.
So you can multitask. You may even be an expert multitasker. But when multitasking, one of the tasks is likely to have less attention devoted to it. Less attention means more errors. And when you’re multitasking, you may not even realize you’re making the errors.
References
Hyman Jr, I. E., Sarb, B. A., & Wise-Swanson, B. M. (2014). Failure to see money on a tree: Inattentional blindness for objects that guided behavior. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 356.
Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. D. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(37), 15583-15587.
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Strayer, D. L., Biondi, F., Behrends, A. A., & Moore, S. M. (2016). Cell-phone use diminishes self-awareness of impaired driving. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(2), 617-623.
