Media Multitasking and Attention: What a 924-Person Study Found

A show plays while you scroll; messages arrive while you read. Using two kinds of media at once is ordinary now, and researchers have argued for more than a decade about whether people who do it a lot have a harder time holding their attention on one thing. Earlier studies disagreed. A 2023 study set out to measure the link carefully, in three different groups of people and in two different ways.

What the researchers did

Kenneth Rioja and Sezen Cekic of the University of Geneva, with Daphne Bavelier of the University of Geneva and Susanne Baumgartner of the University of Amsterdam, published the study in Technology, Mind, and Behavior in 2023. Between November 2020 and April 2021 they recruited 924 people aged 18 to 35 online, from three sources: 322 through Amazon Mechanical Turk, 304 through Prolific and 298 university students in Amsterdam.

Everyone answered a questionnaire about media multitasking: for each kind of media they used, how often they used other media at the same time. The researchers used the established measure from the original 2009 Stanford study of heavy media multitaskers, plus a new, shorter one of their own. Participants also rated everyday attention problems (with statements such as "I am easily distracted"), impulsiveness and sensation seeking.

Then came a 10-minute test of sustained attention, the gradual-onset continuous performance task. Photos of cities and mountains fade one into the next every 1.2 seconds; you press the space bar for every city and hold back for the mountains, which come up only one time in ten.

What they found

• Heavier multitaskers had weaker sustained attention, by both measures. People who media multitasked more reported more everyday attention problems and did worse on the test. Both correlations were about 0.2 (0.20 for the questionnaire, 0.21 for the test), which the authors, following a common benchmark, rate as medium-sized.
• They also reported more impulsiveness and more sensation seeking, with a correlation of 0.24 for each.
• The link pointed the same way in all three groups, but its size varied, and the Mechanical Turk group differed most from the other two. The authors suggest that differences between samples like these help explain why earlier, smaller studies disagreed.
• How you measure multitasking matters. The new short questionnaire did about as well as the old one for the self-reports, but tracked the attention test only weakly.

What the study can't tell you

This is a snapshot: everyone was measured once. It can't say whether multitasking wears attention down or whether people whose attention already wanders multitask more, and the authors write that, after more than a decade of research, that question is still unanswered.

The participants were young adults recruited online, and their multitasking was what they reported, not what their devices logged. A correlation of 0.2 also leaves most of the differences between people unexplained: plenty of heavy multitaskers pay attention well, and plenty of light ones don't.

What it means for your phone

Whichever way the arrow points, the practical answer is the same: give demanding things one screen at a time. Keep the phone out of reach for reading or work that needs you, and notice the moments you reach for a second screen out of habit rather than need.

For a stretch of focused work, a Work, Focus or Reading session in Unrotten, started from Home's + button, keeps the apps you chose locked until it ends, with a countdown on your Lock Screen. For the everyday causes of scattered focus and what to change first, read our guide to short attention span, and for the bigger picture, attention span.