by Althea Need Kaminske

When I got married, I had no idea that my husband would become my office mate. COVID19 has affected our lives in a number of ways, one of them being that we now both work from home in the same home office. For most of my career I’ve been lucky enough to have my own office. It had its fair share of distractions (I used to eat lunch with the lights off, careful to type quietly so that I couldn’t be heard by the students who somehow only had problems that only I could solve during the 20 minutes I had to myself to eat lunch) but by and large it offered me a place to focus on work. Now, every email answered, every blog post written, every meeting zoomed, is a minor miracle of focused attention as my husband takes work calls in the background and we take turns with baby duty. I am not a great multitasker, and chances are that you aren’t either.

When people say they are multitasking, i.e. doing more than one task at the same time, what is really happening is that they are rapidly switching between tasks. When we engage in task switching, several things have to happen. We have to disengage with the first task, find the new task, find the new task parameters, and engage in the new task. Our brains are able to do this very quickly, so it feels like we are doing two things at once. And, in fact, the more practiced or experienced we are at a task the faster we get at task switching and the more automatic the task becomes. Like walking and chewing gum.

When we talk about multitasking, however, we’re usually talking about tasks that are a bit more complicated than walking. Like driving and talking on the phone (1) or typing and email while answering questions about your grocery list. For these slightly more complicated tasks, task switching comes at a cost. We’re slower to respond, we make more mistakes (2), and our memory for the tasks we’re trying to do is worse (3). It’s this last consequence of task switching that may explain why we feel like we are multitasking. We don’t remember the mistakes we made or the information we missed. This is most obvious to me when I diligently remind students of an upcoming exam or assignment at the end of a class period, only to have them insist later on that they were not warned. My well intentioned reminders were given when students were distracted - finishing up their notes from the class, packing up their materials, and anxiously waiting for the class to end so they could get to lunch, their next class, or meet up with their friends. For the students who were distracted it was as if I never gave the reminder. They felt they were successfully multitasking (listening while checking the time on their phone) because they weren’t aware of the information they had missed.

Another example of our inability to remember or process information that we didn’t pay attention to is this excellent demonstration of inattentional blindness from Daniel Simons. Inattentional blindness refers to the finding that we do not appear to remember or even perceive information that we do not attend to. We are blind to it. If you haven’t already, I recommend taking a minute to watch the video. 

This example of inattentional blindness is striking. For those who saw the gorilla it seemed obvious and perhaps a bit startling. For those who did not see the gorilla, it’s a little unsettling to realize that they can miss something so obvious (For more examples of inattentional blindness and other demonstrations of slip ups in attention I recommend checking out the rest of the videos on Daniel Simons’ website). This example might seem a bit contrived - how often are people in gorilla suits walking around? - but research on attention suggests that these lapses in attention happen all the time. When we are focusing on one task or event, it’s easy for us to miss even obvious things going on in our environment.

Multitasking and inattentional blindness highlight two different aspects of our attentional systems. On the one hand, multitasking divides our attention. Divided attention, or diffuse attention, are different ways of describing task switching. While I’ve described task switching as harming cognitive processes - it leads to slower response times, more errors on the task, and poorer memory (2,3) - it is actually a very important ability. For instance, I live in a neighborhood with deer and small children. When I’m driving it’s important that I focus on the road in front of me, but I also need my attentional system to alert me to moving creatures on the side of the road. In this case I want my attention to get distracted so that I can avoid an accident. This feature of our attentional system becomes a problem, however, when we can’t stop alerting to new things in the environment. When we get easily distracted by a passing thought, a sudden noise, or email notification, then we need to counteract this part of our attentional system

Selective attention, or focused attention, refers to our ability to focus on one task and ignore other stimuli. When we talk about reducing multitasking, we often talk about improving our focus and only attending to one task at a time. In contrast to multitasking, this should increase response times, reduce errors on task, and improve memory (2, 3). However, what inattentional blindness demonstrates is that selective attention can also leave us blind to other things happening in our environment.

If both divided and selective attention can lead to errors in attention, then what can we do? The obvious and difficult answer is that we should selectively attend to the most important information. This is difficult because it’s not always possible and because it’s not always apparent what the most important information is. As teachers, we can improve learning by designing our lectures and lesson plans to minimize distractions and to highlight important information. As students, we can improve learning by reducing distractions (turning off notifications, minimizing windows, turning off the show or video you’re watching, etc.) and asking questions to make sure you take away the main points from a lesson.

Of course, it is not always possible to get rid of all your distractions. Many people who are working from home (sometimes while kids are learning from home) are finding it very, very distracting. This might seem like a strike against working from home, but before the pandemic people worked from home. However, in talking to friends who work from home they emphasized the importance of setting up a separate work space to help them stay focused and on task. If they had children they talked about hiring nannies, setting up childcare, or relying on the kids going to school for portions of the day in order to minimize distractions. Many of them have struggled to remain productive with the recent transition to having their spouses or children around more frequently. Hopefully understanding a bit more about how attention works will help you understand some of the challenges you face as a teacher or learner trying to learn or work remotely.

If you would like to learn more about multitasking and attention, how to avoid it, and even get a nice pro/con list of different uses of technology in the classroom and how they affect attention, we have digests (here, here, and here) and blog posts that touch on the topics of task switching, focused attention, and tips for students.

References

1. Strayer, D. L. & Johnston, W. A. (2001). Driven to distraction: Dual-task studies of simulated driving and conversing on a cellular telephone. Psychological Science, 12(6), 462-466. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00386

2. Rodgers, R. S. & Monsell, S. (1995). Costs of a predictable switch between simple cognitive tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 17(3), 207-231.

3. Richter, F. R. & Yeung, N. (2015). Corresponding influences of top-down control on task switching and long-term memory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68(6), 1124-1147.