Efficient, helpful, or distracting? A literature review of media multitasking in relation to academic performance

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (2010), media use is the dominant way adolescents and young adults spend their time, averaging more than 7.5 h of use daily—almost the equivalent in length of a full work day (Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2010). Students increase media absorption by using two or more mediums simultaneously via media multitasking, experiencing 10 h and 45 min of media content within their daily 7.5 h. This behavior carries into college, where media use is largely unregulated. Hwang, Kim, and Jeong (2014) found that 90% of university students multitask when using media, and that more than half of time spent on media involves multitasking. Junco (2012) found that 69% of students reported text messaging during class, 28% reported using Facebook and email in class, with 21% using the mediums for off-task purposes. An examination of 3372 self-directed computer sessions by 1249 students via time logs revealed that 99% of sessions involved some multitasking (Judd, 2014).

College students commonly but erroneously report that multitasking increases productivity (Lin, Cockerham, Chang, & Natividad, 2015). Other students multitask on a situational basis according to motive. A student with a specific goal and sufficient motivation, such as studying for an upcoming exam in a difficult class, is less likely to multitask. On the other hand, students with less consequential goals, such as communicating with friends for leisure via Facebook or email, are more likely to multitask (Judd & Kennedy, 2011).

The ubiquity of media multitasking among today’s students raises concerns about its consequences and outcomes in relation to student learning and cognition. The aim of this paper is to synthesize existing research on the effects of media multitasking on academic performance, and to highlight implications for students and educators. This paper reviews pertinent theories and analyzes research evidence for the effects of media multitasking on aspects related to cognitive functioning in academic performance, including grade point average (GPA), efficiency, reading comprehension, self-regulation, and test performance. An initial review of the literature was conducted in the fall of 2015 through the PsychInfo database. An additional literature search was conducted in the summer of 2017, and a final search in the fall of 2017 during revisions to ensure comprehensiveness. Search words and phrases included media multitasking, cognition, multitasking, academic performance, and self-regulation. A “snowball” method of using the most recent works to find citations provided in them was used. This review analyzed 38 articles from 2003 to 2017 that primarily investigated academic effects of media multitasking habits of college-aged students. Articles were excluded if they did not involve multitasking but rather generalized media use, if they were published prior to 2000 (with the exception of theoretical articles), or if they were not primarily focused on investigating effects of multitasking on academic performance.

Cognitive functioning while multitasking: Theoretical foundation

Multitasking may impair learning through rapid use of the limited capacity of learners’ information processing channels, especially attention processes, leaving insufficient space for meaningful learning. This is based in information processing theory, the scattered attention hypothesis, and bottleneck theory in which attention is a limited resource (Maslovat et al., 2013; Van dur Schuur, Baumgartner, Sumter, & Valkenburg, 2015). The term ‘attention’ refers to how individuals actively process specific information in their environment. Attention is selective and enhances processing of the attended stimulus while diminishing processing of unattended stimuli. Collectively, these theories serve to elucidate the manner in which media multitasking decreases academic performance and impacts cognition.

Theories of attention

According to the bottleneck theory of attention, attention can be allocated to only one task at a time. Thus, multitasking is a myth; instead, the mind switches between tasks. Stimuli arrives at a processing ‘bottleneck,’ at which only one item can be processed at a time (Broadbent, 1958; Maslovat et al., 2013). Because attentional resources are limited, filtering of stimuli must occur. The bottleneck postpones aspects of processing of the secondary task until the primary task is completed.

Van dur Schuur and colleagues (van dur Schuur et al., 2015) suggest two opposing consequences of media multitasking with regards to cognitive control, which they referred to as the scattered attention and trained attention hypotheses. According to the scattered attention hypothesis, long-term media multitasking may lead to disrupted cognitive control in which the individual gravitates towards the preferred task rather than maintaining focus despite attentional distractions (van dur Schuur et al., 2015). Cognitive control includes several processes, such as focusing attention on goal-relevant information, filtering irrelevant information, switching efficiently between tasks, and retaining information temporarily (van dur Schuur et al., 2015; Uncapher, Thieu, & Wagner, 2016). Engaging in multiple tasks highly demands attentional capacity, resulting in deficits in cognitive control (Chinchanachokchai, Duff, & Sar, 2015; Miller & Cohen, 2001; Ophir, Nass, & Wagner, 2009; van dur Schuur et al., 2015). Thus, multitasking reduces performance by causing interference, distraction, and ultimately errors (Courage, Bakhtiar, Fitzpatrick, Kenny, & Brandeau, 2015).

The scattered attention hypothesis maintains the information processing theoretical approach to cognition, in which the brain is a device that employs mental resources to carry out operations and complete tasks. According to this theory, the executive system controls mental resources, allocating them where necessary. Per information processing theory, attention is a limited resource. According to the scattered attention hypothesis, media multitasking hastens the depletion of the attentional resource, consequently diminishing performance on the primary task. If—as is the case with media multitasking—attentional demand exceeds attentional capacity, the cognitive system overloads and performance suffers.

On the other hand, the trained attention hypothesis argues that frequent media multitasking could positively affect cognitive control via eventual training and improvement of control processes. According to this theory, multitasking promotes mental flexibility that enables high-level efficiency and productivity, skills essential for success in modern work and learning environments (Courage et al., 2015). The trained attention hypothesis asserts that ability to filter irrelevant information could improve through frequent practice multitasking (Alzahabi & Becker, 2013; Ophir et al., 2009). Research is more consistent with the scattered attention hypothesis than the trained attention hypothesis (van der Schuur et al., 2015). This is because experimental literature to date on divided attention and dual-task performance demonstrates a limited processing system and consequential deterioration in performance and productivity when multitasking (Courage et al., 2015). Nevertheless, examination of distractor filtering in multitaskers of various frequencies presents a difference in performance, pointing to the potential validity of the trained attention hypothesis (Cain & Mitroff, 2011). Heavy and low media multitaskers (categorized by media multitasking index score via the Media Use Questionnaire; Ophir et al., 2009) completed a singleton distractor task with low working-memory demands. Students who were not frequent media multitaskers relied on top-down information to complete the experimental task, applying top-down distraction filtering to improve performance. Frequent media multitaskers, on the other hand, attended to and processed stimuli to the same degree regardless of whether or not the presented stimuli could be the target. Cain and Mitroff (2011) argue that the difference in performance on the attentional task affirm attentional differences in heavy media multitaskers; thus, frequent media multitaskers may maintain a wider attentional scope which allows attention to more visual information compared to infrequent multitaskers who maintain a narrower attentional scope.

Working memory theories

Theories of working memory also provide insight to the cognition of media multitasking. Attention biases towards objects that match the current contents of visual working memory (Hollingworth & Beck, 2016). Visual working memory is a cognitive system that holds a limited amount of visual information in a temporary storage buffer so that it may be accessed to efficiently achieve goals. Recent research points to working memory as a predictor of multitasking ability, more so than other cognitive, personality, and experience-based variables. For example, Cain, Leonard, Gabrieli, and Finn (2016) found that frequent media multitasking was associated with poorer performance on behavioral measures of working memory capacity. However, studies like that of Cain et al. (2016) rely on dual-task measures of working memory. Thus, Redick (2016) examined whether working memory measures must be dual-tasks to predict multitasking performance, finding that single-task working memory measures also predict multitasking performance. Accordingly, the relationship between working memory and multitasking is independent of the method of task used to assess working memory. This indicates that working memory is perhaps fundamental to individual multitasking ability.

This paper relies on the aforementioned models to examine the cognitive impact of media multitasking within the frame of a theoretical foundation, as well as to highlight existing evidence related to academic performance that confirm or oppose the discussed theories.