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+% Mastery Mailing 1
+\documentclass[12pt]{apa7}
+\usepackage[style=apa,backend=biber]{biblatex}
+\usepackage{graphicx}
+\setlength{\headheight}{15pt}
+
+% According to several sources, the following commands should be active
+% for an APA paper, but I just hate them.
+% \raggedright
+% \language255 % no hyphenation
+\parindent=.5in
+\linespread{2}
+
+\shorttitle{Article Review II}
+
+\addbibresource{sources.bib}
+
+\leftheader{Rohrer}
+
+\begin{document}
+\centerline{\textbf{Article Review II: Cognitive Control in Media
+Multitaskers}}
+
+``Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers'' is one of a family of
+studies coming out of the literature about the new impacts from
+technology on our psychology.
+Media multitasking is a new way of consuming media enabled by all the
+screens we have access to.
+Texting on a phone and watching TV or listening to music and reading an
+article are becoming more ubiquitous, but we don't fully understand how
+people's cognition adapts to handle new stimuli and switching quickly
+between tasks.
+This study is concerned with two populations as its dependent variable:
+``light'' and ``heavy'' media multitaskers, whom sit one standard
+deviation away from the norm on a self-report metric, the Media
+Multitasking Index (a proportional metric for how often subjects
+multitask)
+
+The authors hypothesize that these outlying levels of media multitasking
+exhibit a ``distinct approach to fundamental information processing''
+and a ``breadth bias'' for working memory and task performance
+\autocite{multitask}.
+The authors take several measures of each group: a filtering task, an
+AX-CPT task, and a memory task (two- and three-back tasks) and compare.
+Remarkably, the heavy media multitaskers perform worse on every task
+with ``distractors'' but their performance is otherwise statistically
+similar.
+The type of distractor depends on the test, but they are, generally,
+environmentally extraneous information to the task at hand, and heavy
+multitaskers exhibit worse ability to filter out extraneous information
+or focus their attention.
+They are also, surprisingly, worse at task-switching.
+Heavy multitaskers on the three-back test also display a third type of
+deficit: greater interference from irrelevant data stored in memory.
+Together, these may evidence heavy multitaskers' lesser ability to
+control their attention, compared to light multitaskers.
+It is unclear, however, as of this paper, which direction the causality
+of this relationship points.
+
+However, the paper doesn't conclude that heavy media multitaskers are
+only hurt by these traits and tendencies they display.
+Breadth-biased information processing means they probably have a greater
+ability to be distracted by relevant information, or ``bottom-up
+attentional control.''
+They are also biased towards ``exploratory, rather than exploitative,''
+information processing \autocite{multitask}.
+
+The authors take especial care with the metric they created, the
+Multimedia Multitasking Index.
+It is tested against many confounding variables to ensure the study is
+well-controlled.
+From a measure of a new group of participants, people high in the trait
+and low in the trait had no significant difference between SAT scores,
+creativity performance, personality traits, need for cognition, or
+differences with gender.
+The index was also normal, so the population doesn't seem to have a
+bimodal or skewed distribution of multitasking tendencies.
+Also in running the trial, all the tests were administered similarly
+across both groups, performed in the same order on the same hardware, in
+the same setting, for each participant.
+This means the participants in the trial were also controlled for across
+different tests (they were not conducted from independent populations).
+
+The first test run was a filtering task.
+An array of red and blue rectangles was displayed to each participant,
+and a second (changed or not) array was presented, and the participant
+was asked to identify whether a red rectangle had changed orientation.
+The blue rectangles were one of the distractors under which heavy
+multitaskers performed worse (they performed especially poorly, compared
+to light multitaskers, on the trial with only 2 red rectangles and 6
+blue rectangles).
+Other tests measuring the quality of information-processing and working
+memory were the two- and three-back tasks.
+Participants were presented a series of letters and asked to indicate
+whether the letter had been seen two or three letters ago, for the two-
+and three-back tasks, respectively.
+
+The third task tested task-switching ability.
+Heavy media multitaskers, surprisingly, performed slower on this task
+than light media multitaskers.
+Researchers presented a cue for the task (number or letter) and a
+digit-letter pair which the participant identified as either odd/even
+(for the number cue) or vowel/consonant (for the letter cue).
+
+Since the paper did not make conclusions on the causality of this
+relationship, I would be interested to see if any research exists now
+(this paper was published in 2009) on whether heavy multitasking trains
+the brain or if people with an existing breadth bias in
+information-processing are more prone to multitask, especially in new
+media.
+
+\iffalse
+- Hypothesis
+- IV/DV
+- Controls
+- Results
+- Conclusions
+\fi
+
+\vfil\eject
+\printbibliography
+\end{document}