Last week, researchers at Stanford
University published a study showing that the most persistent multitaskers
perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as
non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one
task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact,
worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.
A team of researchers, whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were trying to find out what unusual cognitive gifts multitaskers possessed that made them so successful at multitasking. They’re still looking.
“Multitaskers were just lousy at everything,” said Clifford I. Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford and one of the study’s investigators. “It was a complete and total shock to me.”
Eyal Ophir, the study’s lead investigator and a researcher at Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, said: “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”
