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Re: [xmca] FW: ScienceDaily: Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price, Study Shows



Emily - thanks very much for the info on the Stroop test, and now this study. Lot's of food for stimulating thought.

I find myself thinking about things Vygotsky said about voluntary attention. I find myself reflecting on ADHD and the social assumptions this diagnosis incorporates about paying attention, being still, etc. I am also puzzling over the limitations of the tests that were administered in this study (noticing rectangle positions, noticing repeating letters, and ignoring numbers or letters in mixed sequences), not to mention the narrowness of the demographic that was sampled, as Bruce mentions.

There is an obvious aspect of humor in the article and some remarks made so far. An interesting question to ask is why are attention issues often so funny in modern culture? Is there an underlying general social tension about attention? Why?

After having some fun, the article finished up offering these causes and effects:

"The researchers are still studying whether chronic media multitaskers are born with an inability to concentrate or are damaging their cognitive control by willingly taking in so much at once. But they're convinced the minds of multitaskers are not working as well as they could."

What kinds of causes and effects pertaining to the data found in this study, as well as the Stroop test and other relevant phenomena, might CHAT-oriented researchers suggest?

- Steve



On Aug 26, 2009, at 3:46 PM, Bruce Robinson wrote:

I'm suspicious of any theory based on tests with 100 students but this makes me wonder what theories there are about the human attention span (mine is rather short, I think because I keep switching between tasks rather like a computer's operating system).

Any suggestions?

Bruce R

----- Original Message ----- From: "Duvall, Emily" <emily@uidaho.edu>
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 4:06 PM
Subject: [xmca] FW: ScienceDaily: Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price,Study Shows


On the heels of the Stroop test and issues of attention and cognitive
control, the following study just came out.


Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price, Study Shows
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090825113133.htm

Attention, multitaskers (if you can pay attention, that is): Your brain
may be in trouble. People who are regularly bombarded with several
streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their
memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to
complete one task at a time, researchers have found.

~em

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