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A Decade of Data Reveals That Heavy Multitaskers Have Reduced Memory, Stanford Psychologist Says
Stanford [stanford.edu]:
The smartphones that are now ubiquitous were just gaining popularity when Anthony Wagner [stanford.edu] became interested in the research of his Stanford colleague, Clifford Nass, on the effects of media multitasking and attention. Though Wagner, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Memory Laboratory [stanford.edu], wasn’t convinced by the early data, he recommended some cognitive tests for Nass to use in subsequent experiments. More than 11 years later, Wagner was intrigued enough to write a review on past research findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and contribute some of his own.
The paper [pnas.org], co-authored with neuroscientist Melina Uncapher of the University of California, San Francisco, summarizes a decade’s worth of research on the relationship between media multitasking and various domains of cognition, including working memory and attention. In doing that analysis, Wagner noticed a trend emerging in the literature: People who frequently use many types of media at once, or heavy media multitaskers, performed significantly worse on simple memory tasks.
Smartphones make us forgetful?
