Charlie, I cannot multi-task and find your explanation of why some people can and some people cant convince. Im sitting here listening to instrumental music as I write this. I can also read while listening to instrumental music. I can neither compose prose nor read it while listening to vocal music. The words being sung distract me as badly as would two texts each of them being spoken into the opposite ear. My attention ability is great enough that I can put myself enough inside a text to let that text horizon my experience for a while and experience whatever world is being evoked by the text as an alternative reality for that while. I only understood how there could be people in the world who knew how to read but did not read for pleasure when I grasped that everyone does not fully immerse in a text in this way. I do the same with a good film. I think it is easier to immerse in a film than in a text because less cognitive processing is needed to translate the signs into an alternative reality to be inhabited for a while. Im assuming that attention ability includes a capacity to read signifiers and experience that which is signified as immediate. Im a distance educator (English, Education, Psychology, and Statistics) and so is my SO (Math). Im convinced that she reads mathematical symbols and immediately experiences a reality based on these signs which I do not. She can also grade Algebra or an essay while watching a movie. I can not grade essays and do anything else that even remotely involves words at the same time. We both have excellent attention capacity. Her divide capacity is also excellent whereas mine is all but non-existent. TMike --- Charlie Balch <charlie@balch.org> wrote:
It is fascinating how we live in a world that is very different from that of even a few decades ago. The changes to our world expose different abilities.
I suggest a paradigm that we all have certain amount of "attention ability" and that we also have differing attention "divide abilities." A person with a high level of attention ability and a high level divide ability could effectively multitask. A more moderate attention ability with a combined moderate level of attention divide ability might be described as attention deficient disorder.
A person with high attention ability but low attention divide ability would be able to do very well on some tasks. For instance, many persons who create computer code have been found to be border-line autistic. Autistics are very good at focusing on one thing such as the creation of computer code.
Like computer programming, new technologies are exposing talents and abilities that may not have been useful in earlier times. I find this very Darwinian.
Charlie LSU Doctoral Candidate (hopefully done soon) AWC Professor of CIS
-----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Sam Tilden Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2006 4:12 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] multitasking
Technically this is incorrect! They are better able to rapidly change the focus of attention. The article is the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Sam
Nancy Baym <nbaym@ku.edu> 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.
I don't have the citation, and it's not internet research, but the pscyhologist Barbara Rogoff
(http://psych.ucsc.edu/faculty/brogoff/index.php?Home)
has done some cross cultural work between Utah, USA and South America and shown that the South American mothers are better able to multitask than the American mothers. What she did was to bring a toy for the child to play with while she interviewed the mother that was too difficult for the child to figure out alone. The American mothers had to alternate between attending to the interview and the child, while the South American mothers (and I apologize for not remembering the country in which she was working) could do both simulatneously.
Nancy _______________________________________________ The air-l@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
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In so far as literature turns back on itself and examines parodies or treats ironically its own signifying procedures, it becomes the most complex account of signification we possess. John Deely __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com