Iowa State University
rogojina@iastate.edu
Research into “media multitasking” (Beuckels et al., 2021), an umbrella term for using multiple forms of technology at once or using technology while engaging in non-mediated activities, increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. But how new is this phenomenon? What, if anything, has changed in how we study it? Research on the help or hindrance of “background” media emerged in the 1930s, while human multitasking has been a topic of interest since the late 19th century.
Media Multitasking by Decade
The 1890s and Early 20th Century
William James’ (1890) Principles of Psychology raised the idea of humans having a limited processing capacity when it comes to perception and performance. If dealing with two or more effortful processes, like writing and reciting two different poems at once (or doing homework while watching a complex video in 2024), attention is not sustained on both tasks simultaneously. It moves back and forth quickly between them. The idea that humans pay attention to one thing at a time, even if it appears to be simultaneous, was echoed in Ribot’s (1890) Psychology of Attention.
Both James and Ribot briefly referenced ideas that would become important for media and multitasking research in future decades. James (1890) mentioned that if the “processes are very habitual” or form one “system,” humans can attend to “two, or even three, without very much oscillation of the attention” (p. 410). This would later be empirically tested by cognitive psychologists like Allport and colleagues (1972) and lead to more modern theories of cognitive load (e.g., Lavie & Tsal, 1994). Ribot addressed distraction in two forms: either quickly switching between tasks or becoming so absorbed in one that the person is temporarily distracted from all other aspects of life (i.e., now the concept of “flow”; Csikszentmihalyi, 1975).
James and Ribot relied on introspection, a research method that quickly fell out of practice. Though there was mention of divided attention in academic papers of the 1910s and 1920s, behavioral research became contextualized and highly specific, such as best practices in classroom management, manners, and print advertising.
The 1930s
In 1935, Cantril and Allport released a report on the “psychology of radio” where over half of college students believed they were less effective at studying when the radio was on. Fendrick (1937) attempted to test the basis of this belief empirically. He had two classes read the same textbook chapter and then take a comprehension quiz. The control class read as normal and the “distracted” class read while lively orchestra music played on a phonograph. An interesting finding emerged: more students in the distracted group finished the chapter, but those in the control group scored higher on the quiz.
Research on the impact of distraction on academic achievement is still common today, although the main reading task is often displayed on a computer and the distraction tasks include social media feeds, pop-up ads, or random button pushes (Deng et al., 2022; Kononova et al., 2016; May & Elder, 2018).
Distracted driving via radio listening was also investigated. By 1938, over five million cars with radios were in operation in the U.S. There were calls for regulation, but none were enforced—mostly because it was almost impossible to get accurate counts of highway accidents and objectively measure the role of the radio in distracted driving. Suchman (1939) took a secondary research approach, comparing accident reports from two New York City taxi companies. While the results of this study were inconclusive, inquiry into distracted driving continues into today (Held et al., 2024; Tian & Robinson, 2017).
The 1940s and 1950s
Television gained popularity in the 1940s and studies on the effects of television viewing on children’s intelligence and academic achievement emerged soon after (Coffin, 1948; Scott, 1956). These studies led with the assumption that television is doubly deleterious compared to radio, as it “demands the attention of eyes as well as ears” (Clark, 1950, p. 260). Though this was not experimentally tested at the time, public and academic regard appeared to shift. When radio was the only in-home entertainment technology, concerns were raised about its role as a distractor. However, as soon as television was popularized, it was taken for granted that multitasking while listening to radio was acceptable, but the television was a clear agent of distraction.
The computer, although not yet available for personal use, was also incredibly influential at this time. Information processing theory was proposed in the mid-1950s, using a computer as a metaphor for human cognitive processes (Miller, 1956). In 1952, Welford published a work describing the “psychological refractory period”: when two stimuli are presented in quick succession, there is an automatic buffer period that results in a delayed response to the second stimulus. This is because central processing in the brain is unable to encode and respond to two different stimuli at once. In 1958, Broadbent wrote about the limited capacity of perception—that people only perceive what they attend to, not the entirety of their environment. These papers were important for conceptualizing the basic effects of multitasking, and they are still commonly referenced in media multitasking literature (Held et al., 2024; May & Elder, 2018; Ralph et al., 2018).
At this time, media research was still highly contextualized and cognitive research was very theoretical. Inquiry into both topics used different data collection methods and their research questions and theories did not intersect. However, both were responses to technology advances and an increasingly faster-paced life.
The 1960s and 1970s
Mentions of “multitasking” grew at this time—the term originally referring to computer, not human, multitasking. Competing views of human perception and cognitive processing abounded. The late selection view posited by Deutsch and Deutsch (1963), for example, was a response to Broadbent (1958); Treisman (1969) wrote an important review of the field; and Allport and colleagues (1972) argued for a “multichannel” processing hypothesis. Their experiments showed that people can successfully multitask when the tasks are different in modality (e.g., repeating back speech while viewing complex visual scenes), though performance on one or both tasks drops as task similarity increases. Advances in computing allowed researchers to test previously untestable hypotheses about cognition using highly sensitive instruments, and conduct more advanced statistical analyses.
This period brought about the first applied media multitasking studies with both media use and cognitive theory as a basis, particularly in the field of advertising. Venkatesan and Haaland (1968), for example, combined the emerging cognitive processing research with Festinger and Maccoby’s (1964) findings on the effects of divided attention on persuasion. They conducted experiments in which participants watched a commercial (with and without visual and behavioral distractions) and found that product recall was much better for the non-distracted groups. Media multitasking is still relevant in marketing research today (Chang & Thorson, 2023; Duff & Segijn, 2019).
The 1980s and 1990s
This period saw the proliferation of personal computers, video game systems, portable music players, and more. With the economic and political changes of the 1980s, streamlining human productivity gained momentum.
The methods and theories used in this era of media multitasking research were similar to today, even if the volume of studies was smaller. Cognitive and perceptual load theories were fully established by this time and were applied more to media use research. Reese (1984) investigated how visual-verbal redundancy influenced learning from television news, and Armstrong and Greenberg (1990) experimentally tested many different research questions about the influence of “background” television. They also began to investigate physiological arousal and other variables as mediators and moderators. Researchers also examined the role of background music and noise specifically, separately from other forms of media multitasking, at this time (Pashler, 1993; Furnham & Bradley, 1997).
The 2000s to Today
The term “media multitasking” (Roberts et al., 2005) was coined and received wide academic attention in the early 2000s, as in-home Internet use became increasingly accessible. In 2005, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report on the media use habits of over 2,000 U.S. children 8-18 years old, and in 2006, they released a supplemental report focused solely on media multitasking. The phenomenon was defined as “engaging in more than one media activity at a time” (Foehr, 2006, p. 1) and it was found to occur during about a quarter of media use time for the average child. The authors speculated that while multitasking might take time away from non-mediated pursuits and lead to difficulties with concentration, it may also help children in the future when technology becomes an even greater part of their lives. This report used a developmental and applied psychology perspective, and it sparked general interest.
In 2007, the first smartphone was released. Media multitasking could happen almost instantly from anywhere. Ophir and colleagues (2009) detailed a series of experiments comparing the cognitive functioning of heavy versus light media multitaskers, finding that the former had comparatively lower working memory functioning and greater difficulty with filtering distractions and task switching.
The work inspired several new lines of research, spanning cognitive science, communication, human-computer interaction, and developmental perspectives (Beuckels et al., 2021). There have been advances in data collection and analysis methods (Baumgartner et al., 2017; Parry & Fisher, 2024; Wiradhany & Baumgartner, 2019) and wide-spanning research into the antecedents and outcomes of media multitasking (Duff et al., 2014; Fisher et al., 2023; Kononova & Chiang, 2015; May & Elder, 2018; Murphy & Creux, 2021; Ralph et al., 2018). There has also been an increased focus on examining specific media combinations (Baumgartner & Wiradhany, 2022; Wang et al., 2015) and multitasking in different contexts, like while watching sports (Weimann-Saks et al., 2020) or in social situations (Yang et al., 2021).
Conclusion
Research on how humans handle combining tasks has been around for over a century. It’s also notable how many disciplines the topic of media multitasking has spanned. From the 1930s to the 1960s, studies on “background” media use primarily showed up in applied psychology, education, and broadcasting journals.
For the most part, these studies made no mention of cognitive processes or theoretical frameworks. They only discussed the prevalence of X type of technology, prior outcomes from using the technology, and sometimes people’s attitudes. In the 1950s, cognitive psychology research on attention and multitasking focused on basic research, not application. By the late 1960s, the cognitive revolution reached media multitasking research. Following this, the topic appeared to be the domain of mass communication researchers, who had started asking more complex questions about media effects and incorporating theory from different related disciplines. Developmental and educational psychology regained interest in the early 2000s with the release of the Kaiser report. Since then, media multitasking has also been studied from the perspectives of human factors and clinical psychology.
While the technology and disciplinary approaches have changed frequently, the human drive to accomplish as many things at once as possible has not. It appears that while media multitasking often interferes with performance, it is still commonly done—likely because it offers alternative rewards.
References
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