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@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 _____________________________________________________________________
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