While personal computers, the Internet, cell phones and other information services and technologies are unquestionably powerful resources for communication and for information access, there is growing concern that the widespread use of these tools may be negatively affecting individuals, groups, and even society as a whole. The press is filled with articles on information overload, multitasking, fragmented attention, and the accelerating pace of life. And there is a growing body of scientific literature that bears on these issues, demonstrating in particular that multitasking degrades human performance. New technologies are sometimes suggested as a way to alleviate the problem. This study explores a different but complementary approach: training users through meditation to work more effectively and less stressfully with existing information technologies. The PI will offer people training in meditation and then test their ability to perform a set of time-limited information-intensive tasks. While prior studies of the efficacy of meditation have provided experimental evidence that such training helps people maintain focus and reduce interference resulting from distraction, no one has yet attempted to demonstrate such effects specifically in relation to the use of information technology. The PI's goal in this study is to do just this. Human resources personnel in San Francisco and Seattle will be recruited to attend eight weeks of training in either meditation or relaxation. Participants will be given a test of their multitasking abilities (involving the use of e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and face-to-face conversation in an office-like setting) both before and after the training, and their performance will be evaluated along four dimensions: accuracy; time to completion; satisfaction and well-being; and memory for the task. Project outcomes will thus make a contribution both to the growing body of scientific literature demonstrating that multitasking degrades human performance, as well as to the largely separate literature demonstrating that meditation training can help people maintain focus and reduce interference resulting from distraction, and will serve as a bridge between them.
Broader Impacts: There is growing evidence that rampant multitasking and accelerated modes of working can result in health problems and diminished effectiveness. If it can be demonstrated that meditation training diminishes some of these negative effects, then the door will be open to creating ameliorative training for both students and adult workers.
Multitasking is a widespread phenomenon in today’s information-saturated world, and there is considerable concern about its negative consequences for both personal health and effectiveness. This has resulted in strong requests for guidance and understanding from parents, educators, employers, and workers. Prior studies have shown that certain forms of meditation are capable of enhancing attentional skills, permitting people both to concentrate more deeply and to switch between objects of attention more fluidly. We were thus interested to investigate whether training in mindfulness meditation, by enhancing attention, might improve multitasking behavior. We recruited human resource (HR) managers, who were given either 8 weeks of training in mindfulness meditation, in relaxation training, or nothing (a waitlist control group). Both before and after training, the participants were given a relatively naturalistic and intentionally stressful test of their multitasking abilities, which required them to perform a series of typical office tasks, making use of a laptop computer and a telephone, and fielding a barrage of phone calls, email and instant messages. The performance of participants was scored along a number of dimensions, including accuracy, time to completion, stress, time on task, and number of task switches. The main results were as follows: Those in the meditation group experienced less self-reported negative emotion (stress) than those in the relaxation or control groups. The meditators and those in the relaxation group also showed improved memory for the details of the work they accomplished during the multitasking test. And participants who underwent meditation training were less fragmented in their work, switching among competing tasks less frequently and spending greater time on task without increasing overall test time; they also began fewer tasks overall. These results are promising: first, because they suggest that attention-training via mindfulness meditation may provide a means to enhance people’s multitasking behavior, thus addressing some of the concerns of parents, educators, employers, and workers; and second, because they suggest that more research into attention-training in relation to multitasking is warranted.
