Multitasking Brings New
Meaning to Irrelevancy 

People
who multitask in a variety of media, such as texting, instant messaging, online
video watching, talking on the phone, and word processing, do worse on tests in
which they need to switch attention from one task to another than people who
rarely multitask in this way, according to a new study by Stanford University.
One reason, according to the findings, is that heavy multitaskers are more
easily distracted by irrelevant information than people who aren't constantly
in a multimedia frenzy. "They're suckers for irrelevancy," said
Clifford Nass, professor of communications and one of the study's authors.
"Everything distracts them."
 
The researchers gave 262 college students a questionnaire about what types of
media they used and how often they used them simultaneously. The participants
then took a series of tests in which they had to categorize words, evaluate the
position of red triangles on a computer screen (while ignoring blue ones),
switch back and forth between classifying letters and numbers, or press a
button when there was a match between two letters presented at different times.
Compared with those who rarely used more than one type of media at a time,
heavy multitaskers had slower response times, most often because they were more
distracted by unrelated information and because they retained that useless
information in their short-term memory, the study found.
 
Sources: www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/25/multitasking.harmful/index.html
 
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html