Media use has been on the rise in adolescents overall, and in particular, the amount of media multitasking-multiple media consumed simultaneously, such as having a text message conversation while watching TV-has been increasing. In adults, heavy media multitasking has been linked with poorer performance on a number of laboratory measures of cognition, but no relationship has yet been establishe...

We investigated whether multitasking with media was a unique predictor of depression and social anxiety symptoms. Participants (N=318) completed measures of their media use, personality characteristics, depression, and social anxiety. Regression analyses revealed that increased media multitasking was associated with higher depression and social anxiety symptoms, even after controlling for overa...

This paper discusses users’ cognitive coordination processes and their shifts in cognition when multi-tasking across different information searching problems on the Web. Preliminary results are presented for an exploratory study investigating the nature and roles of multitasking and cognitive behaviors during 42 Web searches. The purpose of this study is two-fold: (1) to understand the nature o...

Education systems are complex and involve interactions between humans (teachers and students); media based technologies, lectures, classrooms, etc. to provide educational services. The education system performance is characterized by how well students learn, which is measured using student grades on exams and quizzes, achievements on standardized tests, among others. Advances in portable commun...

Using a time-diary, the authors asked 935 undergraduate college students to report on their multitasking habits while engaged in four main activities: reading for fun, watching TV, reading for school purposes, and using the Internet. The authors examined student data to find out (a) whether their multi-tasking habits vary significantly by college classification and (b) whether they felt the tim...

Although the concept of multitasking itself is under debate, smartphones do enable users to divert attention from the task at hand to nongermane matters. As smartphone use becomes pervasive, extending into our classrooms, educators are concerned that they are becoming a major distraction. Does multitasking with smartphones impede learning? Can they be used to enhance learning instead? This arti...

Recent studies show that humans engage in multitasking behaviors as they seek and search information retrieval (IR) systems for information on more than one topic at the same time. For example, a Web search session by a single user may consist of searching on single topics or multitasking. Findings are presented from four separate studies of the prevalence of multitasking information seeking an...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Deficits in the ability to multitask contribute to gait abnormalities and falls in many at-risk populations. However, it is unclear whether older adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) also demonstrate impairments in multitasking. The purpose of this study was to compare multitasking performance in cognitively intact older adults with and without DM and explore its rel...

BACKGROUND The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been proposed to play an important role in neural processes that underlie multitasking performance. However, this claim is underexplored in terms of direct causal evidence. OBJECTIVE The current study aimed to delineate the causal involvement of the DLPFC during multitasking by modulating neural activity with transcranial direct curren...

OBJECTIVE In this study, we investigated the effects of mild motion sickness and sopite syndrome on multitasking cognitive performance. BACKGROUND Despite knowledge on general motion sickness, little is known about the effect of motion sickness and sopite syndrome on multitasking cognitive performance. Specifically, there is a gap in existing knowledge in the gray area of mild motion sickness...