Demands involving the scheduling and interleaving of multiple activities have become increasingly prevalent, especially for women in both their paid and unpaid work hours. Despite the ubiquity of everyday requirements to multitask, individual and gender-related differences in multitasking have gained minimal attention in past research. In two experiments, participants completed a multitasking s...

Electronic screens on laptop and tablet computers are being used for reading text, often while multitasking. Two experimental studies with college students explored the effect of medium and opportunities to multitask on reading (Study 1) and report writing (Study 2). In study 1, participants (N = 120) read an easy and difficult passage on paper, a laptop, or tablet, while either multitasking or...

Personal travel is undertaken principally as a means of access: to opportunities, services, social networks and other goods. The Internet now provides an additional form of access, enabling many activities to be reached without recourse to physical mobility by the individual undertaking the activity. However, the social and transport effects of this 'virtual mobility' are uncertain. Here, it is...

Recent studies show that humans engage in multitasking information behaviors, often in libraries, as they seek and search for information on more than one information task. Multitasking information behaviors may consist of library search and use behaviors, or database or Web search sessions on multiple information tasks. However, few human information behavior models of seeking, searching or us...

Portable media devices are ubiquitous and their use has become a core component of many people’s daily experience, but to what effect? In this paper, the authors review research on the ways in which media use and multitasking relate to distraction, distractibility and impulsivity. They review recent research on the effects of media multitasking on driving, walking, work, and academic performanc...

In exploring the efficacy of reconfigurable computing, one of the dimensions is the possibility for multitasking on an FPGA-based processor. Conventional computers and operating systems have demonstrated the many advantages of sharing computational hardware by several tasks over time. The ability to do run-time configuration and readback of FPGAs in a coprocessor architecture enables exploring ...

This paper investigates how individual perceptions and attitudes about an organization influence multitasking behaviors in the workplace. While we know that individuals’ behaviors are influenced by the characteristics of their organizations (e.g., ICTs, physical layout), we still do not know much about how the way individuals interpret their organization influences their multitasking behaviors....

This chapter examines the demands made by multitasking situations in the real world, and argues that the human brain systems critical in dealing with them may be surprisingly circumscribed. Four kinds of evidence are considered: single-case studies of patients with selective multitasking problems; group studies of the relationship between multitasking failures and other cognitive control proble...