Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2022 Jan;151(1):137-160. doi: 10.1037/xge0001077.
With the constantly increasing popularity of human multitasking, it is crucial to know why people engage in simultaneous task performance or switch between unfinished tasks. In the present article, we propose that multitasking behavior occurs when people have multiple active goals; the greater their number, the greater the degree of multitasking. The number of currently considered goals is reduced where one goal's significance overrides the others, reducing the degree of multitasking. We tested these hypotheses in a series of six studies in which we manipulated either goal activation or goal importance and investigated how this affected the degree of multitasking. The results showed that the more active goals participants actively entertained, the more likely they were to plan to engage in multitasking (Studies 1 and 5), and the more often they switched between tasks (Study 2). They also multitasked more under high interruption condition assumed to activate more goals than low interruption condition (Study 3). Further, we demonstrated that the degree of multitasking was significantly decreased by reducing the number of simultaneously considered goals, either via increasing the relative importance of one of the goals (Study 4) or via inducing greater commitment to one of the goals through a mental contrasting procedure (Study 5). Study 6, carried out in an academic context, additionally showed that the importance of a class-related goal negatively predicted media multitasking in class. The results thus show that goal activation is the underlying mechanism that explains why people multitask. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
随着人类多任务处理的不断普及，了解人们为什么同时进行多项任务或在未完成的任务之间切换至关重要。在本文中，我们提出，多任务行为发生在人们有多个活跃目标时；目标数量越多，多任务程度就越大。当一个目标的重要性超过其他目标时，当前考虑的目标数量会减少，从而降低多任务程度。我们在一系列六项研究中检验了这些假设，在这些研究中，我们操纵了目标激活或目标重要性，并研究了这如何影响多任务程度。结果表明，参与者积极考虑的活跃目标越多，他们计划从事多任务的可能性就越大（研究 1 和 5），他们在任务之间切换的频率也越高（研究 2）。在假设比低干扰条件激活更多目标的高干扰条件下，他们也会更多地进行多任务处理（研究 3）。此外，我们通过增加一个目标的相对重要性（研究 4）或通过心理对比程序（研究 5）使一个目标更受承诺，从而减少同时考虑的目标数量，显著降低了多任务处理的程度。研究 6 在学术背景下进行，还表明与课程相关的目标的重要性负预测了课堂上的媒体多任务处理。因此，这些结果表明，目标激活是解释人们为什么多任务处理的根本机制。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2022 APA，保留所有权利）。
