Various studies have found that in the contemporary media environment, people frequently combine the processing of two or other media together. Studies have found that media multitasking, more often than not, has a negative influence on performance of the tasks being combined. For example, if a person talks on the phone while chatting online, the multitasking will have negative influence on the task performances.
In this study, I examined the media multitasking environment as an interaction of individual and message factors. Limited capacity model for motivated message processing (LC4MP) and heuristic Systematic Model (HSM ) for message processing were used as the theoretical foundations. LC4MP provided theoretical basis for the influence on message processing under cognitive capacity constraints whereas HSM provided a framework for investigating the nature of underlying processes.
I examined the way message relevance and use of formatting cues may influence the processing of messages during multitasking. Here, message relevance was considered an individual factor contributing to allocation of cognitive resources to the processing due to increased motivation. The message factor was the number of formatting cues in the message (cue density). These cues organize the information in the message using formatting devices (e.g. bullet points, paragraph indents, and typographic cues) and thus facilitate processing. Three memory measures, free recall, aided/cued recall, and recognition were used as dependent variables for the study.
The results indicated that multitasking was associated with reduced memory performance for all the dependent measures. Similarly, the performance for high relevance messages was significantly higher than the performance for low relevance messages across all memory measures. Additional analyses revealed that multitasking may contribute to more confusion and performance errors during multitasking. People made more errors during recognition tasks during multitasking. Similarly, more people made errors in free recall tasks during multitasking.
Results on multitasking behaviors indicated the dominance of internet in media multitasking environments. Findings suggested that people are more likely to combine those media during media multitasking which give them more control over content presentation and do not involve sharing of modalities.
Overall, findings suggested that multitasking may have more negative influence on message processing in some contexts than others. The implications of findings and future scope of research have also been presented.