[Air-l] multitasking

[Sarah Robbins]

Deanya and all: I think your point here is valid. This is why I decided that
my study structure wasn't really able to answer the question I had. I wanted
to know more about the way students blended multiple sources of stimulation
while they were writing. For example, if they would report that the music
they listened to help them form a sense of tone for their writing or if
switching back and forth between talking to a friend about a paper and
writing the paper itself was helpful. What I found instead was a set of
discreet task switching that happened in really fast intervals and often
didn't contribute to any one goal.
As others have suggested, I don' t think there is such a thing as tru
multitasking (ie truly accomplishing two or more tasks as once). Instead,
what I think we may be seeing is an active task and a passive task going on
at virtually the same time. For example, I can read and respond to email
while listening to a podcast. My ears are paying attention to the item in
the podcast I'm most interested in and when I hear a key word I'm looking
for I stop reading and typing to listen. I can't really tell you what was
discussed on the podcast before, only that it wasn't what I was listening
for. Just as I can read and watch tv at the same time, when in reality what
I'm doing is reading through commercials and pasisvely listening for the
show to come back on to switch from reading to watching.
Of course, if we follow this line of thinking, we have to assume that
students who are engaged in IMing or emailing etc during class can only
passively listen to discussion or lecture (assuming that the online activity
is what is drawing their active attention).  The skill I'm interested in is
the ability to sort of passively survey other inputs while paying close
attention to one important one. Sort of peripheral attention.
What do you think?
S

On 10/15/06, Deanya Lattimore <mdlattim at syr.edu> wrote:
>
> The term "multitasking" is still being used in all of these discussions
> to signify too many conflated variables to reach any significant
> conclusions from these data.
>
> My point earlier was about processing differences.  Auditory and visual
> processing are different things to me, and so I assume to some others
> as well -- probably dozens of different things.  Measuring someone's
> ability to switch back and forth between windows to accomplish multiple
> tasks -- something that I can do with lightning speed -- says nothing
> about one's ability to listen in class and gloss over words on a screen
> at the same time, something that I would NOT be able to do with any
> measure of "success."
>
> The windows task seems to be something visual for me -- I have no
> trouble processing many visual cues at one time.  The paying attention
> to words task seems to be auditory for me: two different "noises" no
> matter whether I am reading them or hearing them.
>
> We'll have to accept that we have different kinds of processing
> abilities that transcend distinctions between a "multitasking" and
> "non-multitasking" dichotomy before we'll figure out how to design
> studies that can really teach us something.
>
> Has anyone done anything to establish baseline processing differences
> before the "multitasking" tasks were recorded?
>
> Deanya
>
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Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins
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