Does Media Multitasking Actually Wreck Your Attention?

There is a real association, it is small, and the studies cannot tell you which way it runs. A 2009 study reported that people who habitually consume several media at once performed worse on tests of filtering out distraction. Two direct replications found smaller effects, and a meta-analysis of 39 performance-based assays across 12 studies found a small association with distractibility at d equals 0.17.

So something is there, it is modest, and no study in this literature establishes that the multitasking caused it.

What the original claimed

Ophir, Nass and Wagner’s 2009 paper in PNAS opens by noting that chronic media multitasking is quickly becoming ubiquitous, although processing multiple incoming streams of information is considered a challenge for human cognition.

They developed a trait media multitasking index to identify groups of heavy and light media multitaskers, then compared those groups along established cognitive control dimensions.

Their result: heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to what the authors themselves call a surprising result, that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set.

Their overall framing: media multitasking is associated with a distinct approach to fundamental information processing.

A commentary published alongside it in the same issue explains why the finding landed as it did. Intuitively, heavy multitaskers should be better at task switching because they frequently switch between tasks, a habit that should have helped them. The commentary also notes the authors’ own proposed account: that heavy multitaskers tend to be breadth-biased, inclined to pay attention to a larger scope of information rather than focusing on a particular piece.

The authors were careful about causation. As the commentary records, the determination of cause and effect remained open: either multitasking encourages a breadth-biased profile of cognitive control, or the differences stem from stable individual differences.

What happened next

Wiradhany and Nieuwenstein published two replication studies and a meta-analysis in Attention, Perception and Psychophysics in 2017, noting that subsequent studies did not all show the association, casting doubt on the reliability of the initial findings.

They copied the original methods as closely as possible. Their result, in their own framing, led them to question the existence of an association between media multitasking and distractibility in laboratory tasks of information processing.

Their meta-analysis of 39 performance-based assays across 12 studies using the same or similar tasks found a small association with distractibility, at d equals 0.17. No moderating effect of cognitive control function was found.

They are candid about a complication in their own data. Participants in their first replication scored an average of 6.80 on the Media Multitasking Index, against 4.38 in the original studies, and they note response style differences across countries could contribute, which is why they ran a second replication with a different population.

Individual findings across the literature are messier still. One study found participants with higher media multitasking scores were less, not more, susceptible to distraction on a flanker task, and the original change-detection finding was not replicated in several other studies.

What the meta-analyses converge on

Three separate pooled analyses now exist and broadly agree on size.

The 2017 analysis found d equals 0.17 for distractibility across performance-based tasks. A 2021 series of meta-analyses examined self-reported everyday executive functioning across four domains, attention regulation, behaviour regulation, impulsiveness and inhibition, and memory, covering 50 assessments from 16 studies, and found small associations with problems in all four, ranging from z equals 0.16 to 0.22. A later meta-analysis with a broader sample reports that its findings generally support both.

Meanwhile a 2018 review of 21 reports concluded that while the literature is still sparse and marked by both convergent and divergent findings, the balance of evidence suggests heavier media multitaskers perform more poorly across a number of cognitive domains.

Consistent, small, and acknowledged by the people summarising it to rest on a sparse and mixed literature.

The direction problem

Every study described above is correlational. People who report multitasking a lot are compared with people who report doing it less.

That leaves at least three explanations standing. Multitasking might degrade attention. People with less attentional control might be more drawn to multitasking. Or something else, such as a job demanding constant switching, might produce both. The original authors named this openly: either multitasking encourages a breadth-biased profile, or the differences stem from stable individual differences.

Nothing in this literature distinguishes between them, and the effect sizes are small enough that direction matters more than usual. A d of 0.17 is not large enough to justify strong claims in any direction.

There is also a measurement issue the researchers raise themselves: while all included studies used the original index or a variation, many who modified it used different combinations of activities to define media multitasking. When the exposure is defined differently across studies, pooling them is harder to interpret.

Common questions

Does multitasking with media damage my attention?

The evidence supports a small association, not damage. A meta-analysis of 39 performance-based assays across 12 studies using the same or similar tasks as the original 2009 research found a small association between media multitasking and distractibility at d equals 0.17. A separate series of meta-analyses covering 50 self-report assessments across 16 studies found small associations with problems in attention regulation, behaviour regulation, impulsiveness and inhibition, and memory, ranging from z equals 0.16 to 0.22. All of it is correlational, so nothing establishes that multitasking causes the difference rather than the reverse or both arising from something else.

Did the original study hold up?

Partly, and less strongly than its reputation. The 2009 study developed a trait media multitasking index, compared heavy and light multitaskers on established cognitive control dimensions, and concluded that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. Researchers who ran two direct replications, copying the original methods as closely as possible, said their results led them to question the existence of an association between media multitasking and distractibility in laboratory tasks. They also note the original change-detection finding was not replicated in several other studies, and that one study found higher multitaskers were less, not more, susceptible to distraction.

If the effect is real, does it mean I should stop?

The research cannot support that instruction, because it cannot tell you which direction the association runs. The original authors said so themselves: either the amount of multitasking encourages a breadth-biased profile of cognitive control, or the differences stem from stable individual differences. Every study compares people who report multitasking more with people who report multitasking less, so a difference is equally consistent with multitasking reducing attentional control, with people who have less attentional control being drawn to it, or with a third factor such as a job requiring constant switching producing both.

Why is this claim everywhere then?

Because the original result was striking and the follow-ups were not. A commentary published alongside it noted the finding was surprising precisely because heavy multitaskers should intuitively be better at task switching, having practised it. A 2018 review of 21 reports concluded that the literature is still sparse and marked by both convergent and divergent findings, while judging that the balance of evidence suggests heavier media multitaskers perform more poorly across a number of cognitive domains. Researchers also note a measurement problem: many studies modified the original index using different combinations of activities.

A small thing said loudly

The useful part of this literature is not the answer. It is the gap between the size of the finding and the size of the claim built on it.

Three meta-analyses now put the association around a fifth of a standard deviation, using measures different research groups defined differently, in a body of work its own reviewers describe as sparse and mixed. That is a real signal and a quiet one.

What made it loud was that it confirmed something people already suspected about themselves, arrived with a memorable label, and produced a counterintuitive result the authors themselves flagged as surprising. None of those properties is evidence.

The honest position, if you split your attention across several screens most days, is that the research finds people like you score slightly differently on some laboratory tasks, cannot say why, and offers no basis for either reassurance or alarm. That is a different question from how long it takes to refocus after a single interruption, and it has the same shape as screen time and wellbeing, where careful measurement shrinks a large claim. Unwanted office noise is the one attention finding on this site with a mechanism that holds up.