1.9: Optional Topics Students are Sometimes Curious about- Multi-tasking and Listening to Music While Studying or Reading

Multi-tasking

In short, humans don't really actually mutli-task.

Instead of multi-tasking, we are really actually "task-switching" rapidly.

Every time we task-switch, we are increasing our "cognitive load" and generally decreasing our performance on both tasks.

Different research finds different effects, but they are pretty stark -- a 40% loss of productivity is often cited.

In general, as the task is more cognitively demanding, the more detrimental the cost of task-switching/multi-tasking is.

On simple tasks (really, tasks that have become simple for YOU), we can reach "automaticity" -- this allows us to use such a low part of our "cognitive load" that we can still be effective doing more than one task.

Examples:

• Reading!
  • When you first start reading, you first spend a LOT of cognitive load on decoding the words/sounding out the words. If you read with a young kid, you'll probably notice that if there are a lot of words they have to slow down and sound out, their comprehension goes down even if they can successfully sound out the words. After they get to the end (or a natural stop like a comma) of the sentence, they probably have to re-read the whole sentence now to go for comprehension. Most readers can't do both the decoding and comprehension process at the same time -- too high of a cognitive load.
  • However, as you become more "automatic" at decoding, you spend less "cognitive load" on it and you can decode and comprehend in one read-through.
• Walk, talk on the phone, and chew gum at the same time! Am I a multi-tasker?
  • Can a toddler successfully do these things? Probably not -- it's only as these tasks became easy/automatic to me that I can do them all at once.
  • However, if I'm trying to do all three at once, if anything about the environment changes (i.e., a step I don't expect, a stick in the walkway etc.), I am MUCH more likely to trip, stutter, or choke on my gum if I am doing all three things vs. only paying attention to where I am walking.

Next, when your focus is interrupted, most studies find it takes the average person SEVERAL MINUTES to get back into "flow." During that time, the interruption/distraction seems to linger and still steal away some of our cognitive load.

So, when you get distracted by that text message and think, "oh, it's ok, it's only 15 seconds of lost productivity!".... that's probably not correct -- you probably are having multiple minutes wherein you aren't fully back to focusing on the task.

Listening to Music while Studying or Reading?

In short, there is a LOT of argument about this and there is not a perfect answer to the general "Should I listen to music while ______?" question.

There is simply too much variability between tasks and learners to make a blanket rule about this.

However, I would first note that in many studies, they find that while many students think it helps and prefer to do it, the results were often not aligned with the preference.... Aka, many students who think music helps them aren't actually correct -- when they were forced to study material without music, they did better...

As you read this/we discuss this idea in class, keep that in mind -- don't fall victim to "confirmation bias" (that you only pay attention to the ideas that support your already established opinion and discard the evidence than disagrees with your opinion).

In general, for most learners in most situations, music is generally not found to be beneficial and is often found to be detrimental.

In most studies on this topic, they use a general framework of "working memory" and/or "cognitive load." This is somewhat similar to the ideas we're discussing about multi-tasking (i.e., that humans don't actually multi-task -- rather, we task-switch, often quite rapidly and this switching takes part of our "cognitive load").

Basically, attending to/listening to the music/processing the lyrics and music takes some of our "cognitive load."

When we are doing language intensive tasks, lyrics in particular seem to compete with the reading/writing task.

Conversely, on repetitive, simple tasks, music can be a motivational and help reduce distractions. Music can help put us in a positive mood and help us feel "good" --> which has a whole host of benefits for learning (think about our mindset discussions/lectures).

In fact, a lot of the positive results of music haven't been able to separate from other positive-feeling-inducing activities before the task/or during breaks in the task or even as a post-task reward. So, it's possible all the positive results are really just that music makes us feel good!