Utility of Media Multitasking: Experimental Evidence of Auditory Interference and Visual-audio Integration

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2022, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (6) : 1306-1313.

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PDF(1055 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2022, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (6) : 1306-1313.

Utility of Media Multitasking: Experimental Evidence of Auditory Interference and Visual-audio Integration

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Abstract

It is generally believed that media multitasking may negatively affect the execution of tasks, but some researchers have speculated that the multitasking experience would bring individuals richer attention resources and the adoption of attention allocation strategy in information processing. This means that experienced media multitaskers may be more tolerant of interference of irrelevant information than those with less experience and perform better in the integration processing of multi-sensory information. By adopting psychological rotation and lexical decision paradigms, two experiments were respectively conducted to explore the judgment performances of participants with different media multitasking experience on graphics consistency and true (or pseudo) words in the context of auditory information interference and audio-visual matching information. 140 participants were selected by using the Media Use Questionnaire. 35 participants (the top 25%) were assigned to high-experience group, and another 35 participants (the bottom 25%) were assigned to low-experience group. In total, 70 participants took part in the two experimental tasks. In experiment 1, the composite geometric figure was used as visual stimulus and the auditory condition was silence, short treble, or short bass. The auditory information was presented together with the visual information at the same time and the participants were asked to compare the original graphics with rotated ones and then tell the consistency of the two graphics. In experiment 2, taking true (or pseudo) Chinese characters as visual stimuli and the simultaneous presentation of Chinese words pronunciation as auditory stimuli, participants made lexical decision about true (or pseudo) words under the three conditions of silence, visual-auditory matching and visual-auditory mismatching. It is only in the case of true words that there is semantic consistency or inconsistency between visual and auditory stimuli. The results showed that: (1) Taking the judgment of graphics consistency as an experimental task, under the condition of silent and bass interference, the accuracy rate (AC) of low experience group was significantly higher than that of high experience group, while the difference of response time (RT) between the two groups was not significant. Under the condition of high voice interference, the RT of high experience group was significantly shorter than that of low experience group, and the AC had no significant difference. (2) Taking the judgment of true (or pseudo) words as an experimental task, for true words, under the three auditory conditions, the RT under the matching condition in the high experience group was the shortest, and its difference was not significant between high and low experience group. The AC of high experience group under the matching condition was significantly higher than that of low experience group, and there was no significant difference between the two groups under the other two auditory conditions. Under the matching condition, the RT of low experience group was significantly longer than that of the other two auditory conditions, and the AC was significantly higher than that of the silent condition. The difference of the AC between the condition of audio-visual matching and audio-visual mismatching was not significant in low experience group. For pseudo words, the RT of the low experience group was significantly shorter than high experience group in the three auditory conditions, and the AC was no significant difference between the two groups. This study indicate that compared with inexperienced media multitaskers, experienced media multitaskers are less interfered by irrelevant information and they have obvious advantages in the processing of integrating audio-visual channel information. The results also imply that those with media multitasking experience do have richer attention resources, wider attention spans, and more flexible attention allocation strategies.

Key words

media multitasking / auditory interference / audiovisual information integration / attention strategy

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Utility of Media Multitasking: Experimental Evidence of Auditory Interference and Visual-audio Integration[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2022, 45(6): 1306-1313
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