- #36
Evo
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
- 24,017
- 3,337
I agree with your points, but I think on a basic level, a person that is not easily distracted can do three tasks as well or better than someone that can't focus on a single task. For a test to be meaningful, first they would have to be tested for their ability to not be distracted. Then groups of people with the same capabilities would be tested. Obviously someone suffering from ADHD would not be a candidate for a multitasking test. People that aren't proficient or confident in their skills would not be candidates. People that are easily distracted or stressed by larger than normal workloads would not be candidates.Simon Bridge said:Well I provided a link ... ;) (post #27)
It becomes apparent that the ward "multitasking" is used as a shorthand for an ethos ... an expectation that getting people to perform lots of tasks at the same time is more efficient in general than having them focus on one task at a time. You can see the tests they did - basic sorting, low-level cognitive stuff.
Where the only material present was relevant to the tasks to be performed, the "strong multitaskers" outperformed the one-thing-at-a-time people... but, introduce superfluous material and the multitaskers performance went down a lot, even for tasks that did not involve multitasking. You can see how this can be right?
However - that is not the same as saying that humans cannot do two things at once: just that they are generally not as good at it as doing one thing at a time, especially when the task requires focus. It's not disputing that multitasking happens - but compares performance limits with management expectations in a particular regime.
One of the tests we had was a sheet of math problems, while we were working on them a recorded voice would come on telling us "if you answered X to question 10, erase it and put the answer on number 16. A minute later - if your answer to question 10 was not X, place it on question 2. Then a few minutes later the voice would come on and tell you to erase and move something else, often dealing with multiple moves. Then later it would ask you to go back and correct your incorrect answer to question 10 and move it to 16, and re-answer question 2. The exercise was timed. The more mistakes you made, the lower your score was, and you also had to complete the test, some people couldn't take it and quit. It was very annoying.
Last edited: