Supertaskers: Why Some Can Do Two Things at Once

"A new University of Utah study on distraction in the driver's seat finds that such virtuosos do exist: the paper, which has been accepted for publication this year in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, found that a very small percentage of participants — 2.5% to be exact — were able to do other things successfully while driving (in the study, it was solving math problems and memorizing words) without a drop in performance on any task. In fact, some of these supertaskers performed better while multitasking than they did while completing the tasks alone.

The authors of the study suggest that there may be a set of biological, genetic and perhaps behavioral factors that contribute to efficient multitasking, and that maybe some of these factors can even be learned to make the rest of us better at doing two things at once."

Original: http://www.psych.utah.edu/lab/appliedcog...askers.pdf

Related: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...113401.htm
http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

nest0r Wrote:The authors of the study suggest that there may be a set of biological, genetic and perhaps behavioral factors that contribute to efficient multitasking, and that maybe some of these factors can even be learned to make the rest of us better at doing two things at once."

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kazelee Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:The authors of the study suggest that there may be a set of biological, genetic and perhaps behavioral factors that contribute to efficient multitasking, and that maybe some of these factors can even be learned to make the rest of us better at doing two things at once."

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Not sure what you're saying, but I was debating how best to present this article, as the 'presentation' was so wishy-washy. The actual paper didn't deal with this stuff (though they did mention the dual n-back and finding neural/genetic correlates), but I thought it went well with the training working memory/multitasking stuff posted before, especially since the study itself used Jaeggi's research in some fashion. I don't even really think of it as a 'real' study for some reason, though. The paper was kind of meh.

The study suggests that there is a possibility that we might be able to learn how to multitask if we learn how people multitask. Who knew?

you just need to learn some new genetic and biological factors. easy peasy.

Quote:... there may be a set of biological, genetic and perhaps behavioral factors that contribute to efficient multitasking, and that maybe some of these factors can even be learned to make the rest of us better at doing two things at once."

?! :-)

Yeah I wouldn't put much stock into finding a 'multitasking gene'... ;p

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20...?full=true

Anyway, it's less about finding these broad templates and more about studying these dynamics to underscore the variables affected by environmental interactions and thus understanding how to apply them elsewhere, not to mention the support it lends to notions of training multitasking and working memory and these processes leading to superior measurements on tests traditionally known to measure 'intelligence'. Or something. ^_^

I was just pleased to see a kind of middle ground between two previously posted articles, one on 'multitasking is bad', the other on 'multitasking can be trained', and another tentative study that references behavioural, neural, and genetic exceptions and differences.

Edit: And damn, commenting feels like pulling teeth. (More like someone w/ a compulsion to pull their own teeth.) Time for that break..... now!

@Thora - You forgot to bold 'behavioural'. See the original paper for discussion of the kinds of interacting forces the authors posited as possible reasons; mostly they just seemed excited by their findings and want to do more research--I can only presume they won't be conflating neural and genetic and heredity and heritability. ;p

I thought this thread was about learning an infinite number of kanji within a finite interval of time. *disappointed*

nest0r Wrote:Yeah I wouldn't put much stock into finding a 'multitasking gene'... ;p

Korea has known about that gene for over a decade now!

Yeah, that's all I got.

nest0r Wrote:@Thora - You forgot to bold 'behavioural'. See the original paper for discussion ...

on purpose - I could get the learning new behaviour part. I did read in your warrior gene article about environment affecting whether a gene gets activated. I'm afraid I don't have time for the long paper now, but thx.

The multi-tasking stuff does seem to be all over the map. Unfortunately, it's too late for me to become a SuperTasker... I suspect I'm already at that 'Adult Fragile X Syndrome' thingie you linked to earlier. [especially after seeing iSoron's and burritolingus' links lol]

Burritolingus Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Yeah I wouldn't put much stock into finding a 'multitasking gene'... ;p

Korea has known about that gene for over a decade now!

Yeah, that's all I got.

There was an article a couple of years ago about Korean scientists doing a study on Korean Starcraft players to prove that they so are good because of their genetics.

nest0r Wrote:@Thora - You forgot to bold 'behavioural'.

I think Thora did this on purpose - she was pointing out that you can't learn genetic or biological factors.

The Time article really went in for conjecture here, but the original paper is much better. The results are limited to exactly what was found, which has nothing to do with the proximate causes of the supertasking ability, just that supertaskers exist. Thus, we shouldn't try to second guess the causes (nor should the Time journalist).

Dual n-back is really quite an elegant game, though I don't know how many days in a row I could play before getting very bored.

The interesting part for me is that so many people, according to the authors, vastly overestimate their own resistance to attention effects, i.e. people think they can multitask much better than they really can. I think the most productive lesson that can be learned here is to be more critical of your own multitasking ability. It's VERY likely that you suck at multitasking, so stop listening to music whilst doing Anki in front of the TV. Stick on some white noise and focus on Anki.

Burritolingus Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Yeah I wouldn't put much stock into finding a 'multitasking gene'... ;p

Korea has known about that gene for over a decade now!

Yeah, that's all I got.

Damn you for wasting an hour of my time. Great video.