Reply to comment

Claire and Paoli

First, as a class, we recorded our times for all four cases in the "Time to Think" game. The first case we just had to act, in the second, we had to think and act, in the third we had to read, think and act, and finally in the fourth we had to read, negate, think and act. Once we did this, we came up with other experiments we could test our processing times.

BASE LINE-AVERAGES

Paoli: Case 1 (249), Case 2 (407), Case 3 (515), Case 4 (1,124)

Claire: Case 1 (250), Case 2 (322), Case 3 (507), Case 4 (546)

In our group, we chose to first test by having one member say the commands aloud (Paoli) to the experimentee (Claire), who would press the button while looking away from the screen. In addition, we did the cases in reverse order. We thought that this might speed up the process as it is easier to listen than to look. However, the times were much slower than Claire's previous averages. We believe that this is because two people had to process the information (Paoli had to read, think, and then say it aloud, while Claire had to listen, process, and act).

Claire: (5 Trials)
CASE #4: 1330, 1035, 1754, 1283, 1007 (AVG. 1,281 milliseconds)
CASE #3: 1004, 833, 755, 766, 913 (AVG. 854 milliseconds)
CASE #2: 897, 655, 605, 891, 750 (AVG. 759 milliseconds)
CASE #1: 627, 627, 605, 599, 499 (AVG. 591 milliseconds)

For our second experiment, Paoli called her grandparents and spoke to them in Spanish while going through the experiment in English. We thought that in particular cases 3 and 4 would be affected, as these ask one to read in English, so she would be reading and processing in English while interacting and talking in Spanish. We found that actually her times sped up. We were confused by this, but we believe that when she was multitasking she was focusing more on the individual tasks ("I'm multitasking, I'd better focus!"), whereas previously she may not have been thinking about the need to focus as she was only doing one thing. She also noted that she is used to multitasking when talking to people on the phone (like going on the computer, checking email).

Paoli: (5 Trials)
CASE #1: 481, 453, 311, 377, 313 (AVG. 387 milliseconds)
CASE #2: 310, 322, 408, 465, 486 (AVG. 398 milliseconds)
CASE #3: 561, 510, 484, 577, 475 (AVG. 521 milliseconds)
CASE #4: 537, 498, 569, 682, 336 (AVG. 524 milliseconds)

CONCLUSION

We believe that the process is slowed down when two people are involved as they both have to process separately. However, based on our data, multitasking may actually increase one's focus on the individual tasks.