Are women better than men at multi-tasking?

Background: There seems to be a common belief that women are better in multi-tasking than men, but there is practically no scientific research on this topic. Here, we tested whether women have better multi-tasking skills than men. Methods: In Experiment 1, we compared performance of 120 women and 120 men in a computer-based task-switching paradigm. In Experiment 2, we compared a different group of 47 women and 47 men on “paper-and-pencil” multi-tasking tests. Results: In Experiment 1, both men and women performed more slowly when two tasks were rapidly interleaved than when the two tasks were performed separately. Importantly, this slow down was significantly larger in the male participants (Cohen’s d = 0.27). In an everyday multi-tasking scenario (Experiment 2), men and women did not differ significantly at solving simple arithmetic problems, searching for restaurants on a map, or answering general knowledge questions on the phone, but women were significantly better at devising strategies for locating a lost key (Cohen’s d = 0.49). Conclusions: Women outperform men in these multi-tasking paradigms, but the near lack of empirical studies on gender differences in multitasking should caution against making strong generalisations. Instead, we hope that other researchers will aim to replicate and elaborate on our findings. Background In the current study, we address the question whether women are better multi-taskers than men. The idea that women are better multi-taskers than men is commonly held by lay people (for a review see Mäntylä 2013). While the empirical evidence for women outperforming men in multi-tasking has been sparse, researchers have shown that women are involvedmore in multi-tasking than men, for example in house-hold tasks (Offer and Schneider 2011; Sayer 2007). In this paper we address the question if it is true that women actually outperform men when multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is a relatively broad concept in psychology, developed over several decades of research (for a review see Salvucci and Taatgen 2010); this research has enormous relevance for understanding the risk of multitasking in real-life situations, such as driving while using a mobile phone (Watson and Strayer 2010). *Correspondence: [email protected] 1School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK Full list of author information is available at the end of the article There are at least two distinct types of multi-tasking abilities. The first type is the skill of being able to deal with multiple task demands without the need to carry out the involved tasks simultaneously. A good example of this type of multi-tasking is carried out by administrative assistants, who answer phone calls, fill in paperwork, sort incoming faxes and mail, and typically do not carry out any of these tasks simultaneously. A second type of multi-tasking ability is required when two types of information must be processed or carried out simultaneously. An example of the latter category is drawing a circle with one hand while drawing a straight line with the other hand. While humans have no difficulty carrying out each of these tasks individually, drawing a circle with one hand and drawing a straight line with the other simultaneously is nearly impossible (the circle becomes more of an ellipse and the line more of a circle, Franz et al. 1991). Another example is the requirement to process different types of sensory information at the same time (Pashler 1984), such as different auditory streams on different ears (Broadbent 1952). While humans frequently are asked to do such tasks in the psychological laboratory, © 2013 Stoet et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Stoet et al. BMC Psychology 2013, 1:18 Page 2 of 10 http://www.biomedcentral.com/2050-7283/1/18 humans seem to try to avoid these situations in real life, unless they are highly trained (e.g., playing piano, with the left and right hands playing different notes, or having a conversation while driving a car). Arguably, we are not good at doing multiple tasks simultaneously (except when well trained), and that probably explains why this type of multi-tasking is less common than the type in which we serially alternate between two tasks (Burgess 2000). It is because of this that we focus on the first type of multi-tasking in this study. Also, it is important to note that the two types of multi-tasking described above are two extreme examples on a continuum of multi-tasking scenarios. Cognitive scientists and psychiatrists have postulated a special set of cognitive functions that help with the coordination ofmultiple thought processes, which include the skills necessary for multi-tasking, namely “executive functions” (Royall et al. 2002): task planning, postponing tasks depending on urgency and needs (i.e., scheduling), and ignoring task-irrelevant information (also known as “inhibition”). Healthy adults can reasonably well interleave two novel tasks rapidly (Vandierendonck et al. 2010). The involved (human) brain areas necessary for multitasking have been investigated and we can at the very least make a reasonable estimate of which are involved (Burgess et al. 2000). Among primates, humans seem to have a unique way of dealing with task switching (Stoet and Snyder 2003), which we hypothesize reflects an evolutionary unique solution for dealing with the advantages and disadvantages of multi-tasking (Stoet and Snyder 2012). The specific contributions of individual brain areas to executive control skills in humans have been linked to a number of mental disorders, in particular schizophrenia (Evans et al. 1997; Kravariti et al. 2005; Royall et al. 2002; Semkovska et al. 2004; Dibben et al. 2009; Hill et al. 2004; Laws 1999). Currently, there are few studies on gender and multitasking, despite a seemingly confident public opinion that women are better in multi-tasking than men (Ren et al. 2009). Ren and colleagues (2009) extrapolated the huntergatherer hypothesis (Silverman and Eals 1992) to make predictions about male and female multi-tasking skills. The hunter-gatherer hypothesis proposes that men and women have cognitively adapted to a division of labor between the sexes (i.e., men are optimized for hunting, and women are optimized for gathering). Ren and colleagues speculated that women’s gathering needed to be combined with looking after children, which possibly requires more multi-tasking than doing a task without having to look after your offspring. In their experiment, men and women performed an Eriksen flanker task (Eriksen and Eriksen 1974) either on its own (i.e., single task condition) or preceded by an unrelated other cognitive decision making task (i.e., multi-tasking condition). They found that in the multi-tasking condition, women were less affected by the task-irrelevant flankers thanmen. Thus, the latter study supports the hypothesis that women are better multi-taskers. We tested whether women outperform men in the first type of multi-tasking. In Experiment 1, we tested whether women perform better than men in a computer-based task-switching paradigm. In Experiment 2a, we tested whether women outperformmen in a task designed to test “planning” in a “real-life” context that included standardized tests of executive control functions. Our prediction was that women would outperform men. Experiment 1 In this experiment, we used a task-switching paradigm to measure task-switching abilities. Task-switching paradigms are designed to measure the difficulty of rapidly switching attention between two (or more) tasks. Typically, in these types of studies, performing a task consists of a simple response (e.g., button press with left or right hand) to a simple stimulus (e.g., a digit) according to simple rules (e.g., odd digits require left hand response, even digits a right hand response). In task-switching paradigms, there are usualy two different tasks (e.g., in task A deciding whether digits are odd or even, and in task B deciding whether digits are lower or higher than the value 5). An easy way to think of taskswitching paradigms is to call one task “A” and another task “B”. A block of just ten trials of task A can be written as “AAAAAAAAAA” and a block of just ten trials of task B can be written as “BBBBBBBBBB”. Most adults find carrying out sequences of one task type relatively simple. In contrast, interleaving trials like “AABBAABBAABB” is difficult, as demonstrated for the first time in 1927 by Jersild (1927). Today, the slowing down associated with carrying out a block of mixed trials compared to a block of pure trials is known as “mixing cost”. Further, within mixed blocks, people slow down particularly on trials that immediately follow a task switch (in AABBAA there are two such trials, here indicated in bold font); the latter effect is known as “switch cost”. Researchers have given switch costs more attention than mixing costs, especially since the mid-1990s (Vandierendonck et al. 2010)b. In the current experiment, we measured both types of costs.