Fires, Technology, and Multitasking Adolescents

I live in San Diego and have had to watch areas that I know well burn to the ground this past week. Luckily, my home and those of my friends are safe, although there are several threatening fires, so caution is still in place.

Throughout this week it has been interesting to watch the major role that technology has played in keeping teens connected to their friends and the world. I have watched my daughter (17) and her friends spread all over the world, text, e-mail, phone, MySpace and simply connect in any way they can to keep tabs on everyone’s well being. I was sitting with my daughter watching the local coverage of the fires while PIPing [watching a picture-in-a-picture with a second television channel smaller picture placed somewhere on the screen without sound, allowing you to watch one on the main screen with sound and swap the two with the push of a button] CNN and flipping back and forth to get different perspectives. We both had our laptops open and were on several websites each, keeping track of road closures, exact fire locations, evacuations, school closings, and swapping information while at the same time she was texting 6 to 8 of her friends in other Southern California fire areas. “Whew!” she said. “My friend who lives up near the Magic Mountain fire is safe and my friend who is near the tongue of the Witch fire has evacuated and her family decided to drive to Arizona and stay with friends. I’m still waiting to get a text from a couple other friends, but I’m going to check MySpace to see if they have posted anything about what is going on with them.”

In the meantime, on my side of the couch, I had to appeal to technology to keep in touch. Cell phone reception was limited due to the fires but I could IM my parents and my son who is back east in college and reassure them that all was OK for now. My two other children got text messages from me – strangely while phone reception was bad, text messages were going through just fine – and other friends who could not get through on the phone got e-mails or texts depending on what I knew about their technology preferences.

All in all, this was an amazing lesson in the power of communication technologies and how many tools we have available to connect to the outside world. Of course, if the power went out we would be left with only cell phones until they ran out of battery power, but it was fascinating to watch us all multitask to gather information and connect. It was also interesting to see how my daughter could juggle all these communication tools and keep in touch with everyone, while watching television and checking multiple websites, all simultaneously, and all seemingly without exploding her brain from too much cognitive effort.

There is a fascinating often quoted set of studies in psychology performed by E. Colin Cherry in the early 1950s on “dichotic listening” that suggests that people are not able to split their attention and keep track of multiple modalities without severe decrements in the modality that is not getting direct attention. Cherry had people listen to two different messages, one coming through headphones into the right ear and the other into the left. The standard paradigm was to present a passage in the right ear and ask the subject to “shadow” or repeat it word for word as it was presented. The left ear presented different information including other passages spoken by a male or female in English or another language, garbled speech, tones, and other signals either English-based or not. The results, according to Cherry showed: “In no case in which normal human speech was used [in the opposite ear to the shadowed message] did the listening subjects fail to identify it as speech; in every such instance they were unable to identify any word or phrase heard in the rejected ear and, furthermore, unable to make identification of the language as being English. On the other hand the change of voice – male to female – was nearly always identified while the pure tone was always observed. The reversed [garbled] speech was identified as having ‘something queer about it’ by a few listeners, but was thought to be normal speech by others.”

In other experiments, psychologists found a phenomenon that came to be known as the “Cocktail Party Effect” where one can hear his or her name mentioned in a noisy room even when engrossed in a conversation many feet away. However, what is most often lacking in these popular press reports is that only one in three times do people actually recognize their name in the opposite ear when done in a dichotic listening paradigm. Add to this studies that demonstrate that if you perform two tasks at the same time – say talking on a cell phone and driving – the performance on both tasks suffer compared to doing either alone, and you have a picture of a human brain that can multitask, but it is a difficult process and results in poor performance on the secondary task.

So, how are teens seemingly able to multitask with ease, switching from their MySpace to a song on the iPod plugged in their ears, to the television, and to multiple IM screens on the computer? That poses several interesting questions:

1. Are they able to do what Cherry’s subjects could not do, and dissect different messages in each ear?
2. Is their multitasking leading to the same decrement in performance as seen in cell phone and driving tasks?
3. OR, and this is a big or, are their brains somehow changing in a way that they allows them to successfully multitask?

Several of my students are embarking on a replication of the Cherry study with teens to answer some of these questions. I will keep you informed. I am interested in what you think about whether we are witnessing an evolutionary change in brain functioning or simply a generation of children who switch their attention often and are burdened by that process in performing important tasks.