Teens are not as good at multitasking as adults

Teens are not as good at multitasking as adults
 

Multitasking has become an everyday part of life, people talk on the phone while watching television, or type text messages while they walk down the street—and most seem to believe they are pretty good at it.

The researchers with this new effort sought to learn if that is indeed the case, and if there are differences between how well teen girls multitask versus women that have grown to adulthood.

The study consisted of enlisting the assistance of two groups of female volunteers,girls between the ages of 11 and 17, and women between the ages of 22 and 30. Both groups were asked to perform two different types of tasks (one social, one non-social) to determine how well they multitasked.

The social task consisted of asking the volunteers to use social cues to guide decision-making as they attempted to move objects between slots in a set of shelves. The non-social task consisted of asking the volunteers to memorize either a two or three-digit number before they started the non-social part of the experiment.

The researchers then monitored the volunteers to see what sort of an impact having to memorize the numbers had on their ability to move the objects. They found that having to do so resulted in performance deficits when engaging in the social task for all of the volunteers, though more so for those that had to memorize the three digit numbers.

The researchers also found that the girls in the younger group displayed larger deficits than the older women—accuracy fell by approximately 10 percent for the adults and 15 percent for the girls, which they suggest, means the younger girls were less adept at multitasking.

http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/11/150117
 

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