Theme 4 Post 1

Paper: The impact of media multitasking on learning. Lee et al. Published in Learning Media and Technology, March 2012 (at the time with an impact factor of 1.03 and today 1.62).

The article’s purpose was to investigate how multitasking affects our cognition and comprehension. Earlier studies had focused more generally on how the brain works so the angle for this continued research was on learning. Previous studies had concluded that there is a limit for how much information we can process simultaneously. Different activities have different amount of cognitional load. Habits for example are much less demanding than learning  a completely new task. So there’s a common belief that the brain is able to create schemas for facilitating processing of a known type of information. Building upon this the researchers constructed an experiment around reading comprehension. A sample of 130 people were chosen to participate in a test. The test was made up of three parts. The first one allowed the test subject to read chosen literature and prepare to answer questions about it. The second one was almost the same but this time a video would be screened in the background, however the subject was informed that the video could be ignored and not be part of the questions. The third part was the same as number two except that the subject was now told that the video would be a part of the following questions. Statistically they couldn’t find any difference in comprehension between the first two groups but the third group was statistically determined to be different from the rest. The test subjects didn’t perform as well and this would then indicate that the cognitional load was higher for the last scenario.

This experiment together with some applied statistical theory were the quantitative methods used in this article. This might be a sidetrack but for me the ending of the article was a bit anticlimactic. I think that it might be a result of the research which is presented in media channels. That research always seems quite sensational (sometimes it’s justifiable but many times not). However, in this case the results were in line with the build up and the expectations and that’s actually quite valuable too, even though it’s maybe not as interesting.

An obvious limitation with their method is that the number of participants isn’t higher. Also, which they pointed out was that the big majority were female. Diverse demographics are important especially if you want to be able to generalize a result and make it applicable to a large part of the population (obviously this would be a massive undertaking). Another limitation is the questions which were asked after reading. Depending on your background you might find some things more interesting and you learn that meanwhile someone else with a different background focuses on other things. With a limitied questionnaire this could favor one of them. Questionnaires aren’t bad they’re practical but not very flexible. Perhaps they could have had a more open (a benefit of qualitative methods) test as long as it was quantifiable (e.g. naming as many keywords in the text as possible).

By using quantitative methods you expect that the results are going to be more objective. Mathematics is considered to be the purest form of logic and numbers are supposed to speak the truth. Of course this is only the premise, it still depends on how you construct your experiments. Fortunately there are a lot of well established frameworks for doing quantitative research. It’s still possible to manipulate statistics to your advantage if you care more about getting published than doing good research but quantitative research is less dependent on the researchers interpretations. This is not to say that there’s no interpretative part to quantitative methods. One example is how one would link a complex behaviour to a set of variables. This can be a challenging task, which was also mentioned in the paper on VR drumming. PCA could be a useful tool to try to distill the most important components.

The article on VR drumming was investigating the perceived ownership of virtual objects. And also if the look and shape of the object had any effect on the immersion which was found out to be the case. It’s quite amazing how one can change one’s behaviour based on an avatars appearance. It’s also interesting that it doesn’t have to resemble your own appearance for you to perceive ownership over it. If VR could allow you to interact more naturally with machines or elevate your performance, it could have huge implications on work and entertainment.