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1. weak
2. productive
3. easy
4. good
5. great
6. common
7. usual
8. heavy
9. hard
a. regard
b. use
c. purpose
d. direction
e. time
f. step
g. help
h. effort
i. object
PORTRAIT OF A MULTITASKING MIND
Part 2
It seems that chronic media-multitaskers are more susceptible to distractions.
In contrast, people who do not usually engage in media-multitasking showed a
greater ability to focus on important information. According to the researchers, this
reflects two fundamentally different strategies of information processing. Those who
engage in media-multitasking more frequently are "breadth-biased," preferring to
explore any available information rather than restrict themselves. As Lin Lin at the
University of North Texas puts it in a review of the article; they develop a habit of
treating all information equally. On the other extreme are those who avoid breadth in
favor of information that is relevant to an immediate goal.
So what does this mean for you, reading this article listening to music and
surfing the internet? Are you in trouble? Should you curb your media congestion?
Not necessarily. Breadth-bias may still serve a purpose in our media-heavy society.
While the researchers focused on a type of control known as "top-down" attention,
meaning that control is initiated by higher-level mental processes such as cognition in
service of a specific goal, they suggest that heavy media-multitaskers might be better
at "bottom-up" attention. In this type of control, cues from the external world drive
your attention through lower-level mental processes such as perception and habit. In
our fast-paced and technologically advancing society, it may be that having a single
goal on which to focus our efforts is a luxury. We may often be better served by a
control strategy that is cued by the demands of our surroundings. Look around
yourself - do you see notes and to-do lists? Piles of objects meant to remind you
about tasks and goals? These sorts of reminders are a great way to take advantage of
bottom-up attentional control, and this type of control might in fact be more
influential in our lives than we realize.
According to the Dual Mechanisms account of control, proposed in 2007
byTodd S. Braver of Washington University St. Louis, Jeremy R. Gray of Yale
University, and Gregory C. Burgess of the University of Colorado at Boulder, this
sort of breadth-biased, bottom-up control (which they term "reactive") is particularly
good in situations where the environment changes a lot and when the information
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