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\shorttitle{Article Review II}

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\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

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