A One-year Longitudinal Investigation of the Impact of Media Multitasking on Behavioral and Survey Measures of Executive Function among Adolescents.

Abstract

There has been a growing number of studies on the impact of media multitasking (i.e., concurrently engaging in multiple media activities, or frequent change from media activities to other activities) on executive function. In general, the findings were mixed across studies. This study aimed to address the paucity of longitudinal study examining the developmental relationships between media multitasking and executive function by comparing the differences between heavy/high media multitaskers (HMMs) and light/low media multitaskers (LMMs) in executive function (as assessed by questionnaires and cognitive tasks) in a one-year longitudinal study. Altogether, ninety-nine Chinese adolescents (Mean age = 14.41, SD = 1.10; 42 boys; 48 HMMs and 51 LMMs) completed the survey and cognitive tasks at three time points, i.e., baseline, 6 months after, and 12 months after. They were recruited based on their media multitasking score in a project with more than a thousand adolescents. At each time point, the participants’ executive function was assessed by a self-reported questionnaire and three cognitive tasks (i.e., 2-back, Color Stroop and Number-letter Determination tasks). The results showed that: (1) the accuracy on all cognitive tasks improved across times among both groups of participants; (2) the HMMs performed consistently less well than LMMs in the questionnaire measures and 2-back accuracy. This finding suggests that the impact of media multitasking on daily life executive function skills is more apparent than that on performance in standardized executive function tasks. The implications of this study would be discussed.