Finding focus

PERHAPS YOU’RE texting as you read this, or maybe you’re reading a text message while watching TV. Maybe you’re checking e-mail while waiting for another text message, unless the commercials have stopped and your favorite show is back on.

A study released by European neuroscientists in early May suggested that differences in human brains can help explain why some people are easier to distract than others. However, in the April 2011 issue of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, American researchers at Massachusetts’ Boston College suggest that people don’t realize how distracted they really are when they try to do too much at one time, such as trying to text, watch TV and hold a conversation.

“What we found is that when people try to pay attention to multiple media simultaneously they are switching back and forth at an astounding rate,” said marketing professor and study coauthor S. Adam Brasel in a statement. “We’re not even aware of what we are doing when in multimedia environments.”

Head and eye movements

More than 40 college students and staff between the ages of 18 and 65 participated in the study conducted by Brasel and his colleague James Gips. Each participant spent a half hour in a room with a laptop and a 36-inch television. During this time period they were told they could check any website online or use any program on the laptop during the period, and they had the remote control for the TV in case they wanted to watch any of the 59 channels available. Two video cameras recorded the participants’ head and eye movements, tracking the devices to which they paid attention as well as the amount of time they focused on the laptop or TV show.

The researchers found that the study participants chose to spend two-thirds of their time on the computer, but when the tracking data was analyzed, Brasel and Gips found that the volunteers were constantly switching their gaze between the TV and the laptop, spending five to 10 seconds at either screen most of the time. Very rarely did the volunteers spend more than a minute focused on single screen, and those who were looking at the laptop outnumbered the TV viewers by a ratio of three to one.

Before they went into the room, each of the volunteers had filled out surveys at the start about the amount of time they spent on various media such as print, TV or online, and how often they thought they switched their attentions from one to the other when multitasking. The participants’ forms indicated they thought they spent closer to two minutes focused on a single media stream at a time, so the final numbers were unexpected. “We thought it was going to be high, but the frequency of switching and amount of distraction going on was really shocking,” Brasel said.

Drastic underreporting

Though the researchers aimed for a real-world scenario in their study, they didn’t allow the participants to use their cell phones or read any printed materials, both common media distractors that might have also impacted the amount of time volunteers spent on a single form of media. Brasel and Gips concluded in their report that this drastic underreporting of the study participants’ media-switching behavior adds credence to recent work that “illustrates how individuals tend to overestimate their multitasking ability and how heavy multitaskers are prone to distraction.”

One such study was published two years ago by researchers in California. They found that media multitaskers who frequently work with multiple data streams have difficulty focusing on any one topic. In trying to simultaneously keep up with, say, texting, e-mails, radio, TV and print by constantly going back and forth between all of the devices involved, these multitaskers were found to be too easily distracted. The short attention spans meant they were also having trouble sticking to and completing any single project because they were used to juggling multiple assignments.

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