[Air-l] multitasking

[richard hall]

In fact, I have a student doing a thesis on a study of the usability of quad
panel displays, which has many multi-tasking aspects.

First there is definitely a literature in experimental psychology on
multi-tasking, which pretty strong suggests it's bad - the sum of
performance on tasks performed in sequence is better than performance on the
tasks performed simultaneously (which is operationalized as going back and
forth between the two). However, like much of basic research in psychology,
it's strong in controls, but not real strong in ecological validity. One of
the classic studies, involved tasks involving identification of basic
shapes. (rebenstein et al., Journal of Experimental Psych) and there are a
number of others. Basically the idea is that you develop a schema/framework
that is guiding you in one task and it takes additional resources every time
you move to another task and then apply another schema -

Besides the fact that this is not a real task anyone would ever do when
multi-tasking, differences with the applications of multi-tasking as we are
discussing them are that the students may well have developed sort of meta
schemas (my term) from lots of practice so that all the multi-tasks together
are sort of one big task.

More importantly, in my student's research he had participants complete a
web design task using dreamweaver, while using video screen-capture
tutorials and he defined multi-tasking as degree of switching among windows
(not necessarily monitors) and found that multi-tasking actually helped
performance. Of course, in his case the multi-tasks were sort of like
sub-tasks of one big task. So, his interpretation is that multi-tasking can
actually be effective, when the multiple tasks help one another - all are
aiming at one goal - not indpendent tasks. For the record, we publish all
the thesis on line and we'll do that after he defends.

More anecdotally, I will say, in my experience, it's not very fun to lecture
or carry on a meeting or a conversation when your "audience" is doing other
stuff, though I'm not a big fan of lecture much anymore anyway.

Finally, my students are always trying to get me to IM and I find it
annoying in the same way the phone is annoying and, for the same reason that
I really like email. I like responding to stuff when I have a break in my
tasks, and don't like the invasive nature of these tools that  put the
burden on the responder to respond, when it seems to me that the burden
should be on the one who initiates the conversation to wait until the
responder wants to respond (if that makes sense).

... Richard

-- 
Richard H. Hall    
http://richardhhall.org




On 10/14/06 12:12 PM, "Barry Wellman" <wellman at chass.utoronto.ca> wrote:

> As this is the Association of Internet RESEARCHERS, I wonder if anyone has
> done any Research on multitasking -- to address the interesting
> conjectures that a bunch of people have.
> 
> Alas, the only study I know of is our own (actually mostly Anabel's)
> observations, interviews and surveys of a high-tech orgnization:
> 
> Anabel Quan-Haase and Barry Wellman. "Hyperconnected Net Work:
> Computer-Mediated Community in a High-Tech Organization." Pp. 281-333 in
> The Firm as a Collaborative Community: Reconstructing Trust in the
> Knowledge Economy, edited by Charles Heckscher and Paul Adler. New York:
> Oxford University Press, 2006.
> 
> Anabel Quan-Haase and Barry Wellman, "From the Computerization Movement to
> Computerization: A Case Study of a Community of Practice." Forthcoming in
> Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion: From Mainframes to
> Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Ken Kraemer and Margaret Elliott. Medford,
> NJ: Information Today, 2007.
> 
>  Barry Wellman
>  _____________________________________________________________________
> 
>   Barry Wellman   S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology   NetLab Director
>   Centre for Urban & Community Studies          University of Toronto
>   455 Spadina Avenue    Toronto Canada M5S 2G8    fax:+1-416-978-7162
>   wellman at chass.utoronto.ca  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
>         for fun: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php
>  _____________________________________________________________________
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> The air-l at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
> 
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>