This is a site where you can read and listen to some research about multitasking, the topic we worked with last week.
Below there is a video about the same topic. Listen to it once without reading the script, the second time you can check those words you did not understand. Enjoy it.
Stanford University.
Back in 2010, we decided to study what
would happen
when kids were chronically
multi-tasking.
Using email while on Facebook, while
trying to do their homework,
while listening to music, texting, etc.,
etc.
Would it change the way their brains
work when they weren't multi-tasking?
[music
playing]
The very powerful and surprising result
of that 2010 study
was high multi-taskers - kids who
multi-task all the time -
even when they were asked not to
multi-task, when they were only doing one thing,
showed less ability to filter out
irrelevancy,
much more difficulty managing their
working memory
and ironically even the ability to
multi-task.
We then decided to look at a different
domain
namely emotional development. We focused
on 8 to 12 year old girls
because that is the most important age
for social development in girls.
So we created this study, a survey of
3400 girls and looked at
how much they used media. We also asked
about multi-tasking.
And then we asked a bunch of questions
about their social and emotional development.
How likely
were they to succumb to peer pressure?
How good did they feel about themselves?
How much they slept? How many kids their
parents thought were bad influences?
And the results were incredibly
upsetting.
Kids who were heavy media users, heavy
multi-taskers, showed much worse social and emotional development.
So what's happening is, kids are not
practicing basic emotional skills.
There seems to be a pretty powerful
curative,
a pretty powerful inoculant to this. And
that is face-to-face communication.
As your kid grows up, that old-fashioned
saying of "Look at me when I speak to you"
should come back. Yes, it was annoying
for me as a kid, yes it is annoying, but it is annoying for an important
reason.
It's hard work. But it's a hard work
that leads to incredibly positive outcomes.
For more, please visit us at stanford.edu
