Is "Continuous Partial Attention" Real?

Multitasking has been in the news quite a bit lately.  Research has shown that multitasking can make us perform worse -- it's usually better to focus on single tasks.  Often, though, I've seen people try to counter this news in the tech media and blogs by referring to Linda Stone's concept of "Continuous Partial Attention."  She posted an article last week at Huffington Post about this, and it begins:

People often say we're multi-tasking ourselves to death.  Is that really what we're doing? I think not.

I call what we're doing today continuous partial attention, or cpa, for short.

Continuous partial attention and multi-tasking are two different attention strategies, motivated by different impulses. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. Each activity has the same priority - we eat lunch AND file papers. We stir the soup AND talk on the phone. With multi-tasking, one or more activities is somewhat automatic, like eating lunch or stirring soup. That activity can be paired with another activity that's automatic or with an activity that requires more cognition, like writing an email or talking on the phone. At the core of multi-tasking is a desire to be more productive. We multi-task to CREATE more opportunity for ourselves -time to DO more and time to RELAX more.

In the case of continuous partial attention, we're motivated by a desire not to miss anything. There's a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With cpa, we feel most alive when we're connected, plugged in and in the know.  We constantly SCAN for opportunities - activities or people - in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, "What can I gain here?"

Link: Linda Stone: Fine Dining with Mobile Devices

I think I see her point (and I've read more about CPA at her web site).  It sounds plausible that there are different kinds of multitasking, but as far as I can tell this is all just speculation on her part.  Where is the science?  Has anyone done serious psychology studies on this?  What I've read on multitasking contradicts her ideas.  Unless she can cite some studies (or at least work in progress) to show that CPA is a meaningful psychological construct, I have a hard time taking this seriously.

Stone is a writer, speaker, and consultant, and is well known, apparently, as a "visionary thinker and thought leader."  But it's not surprising that the idea of continuous partial attention gets a welcome reception from laptop-bearing technology pundits at conferences.

(Via the believers at Lifehacker.)

Comments

[Mark Sicignano]

I'm with you on this one Kevin for the most part Kevin... Multitasking is detrimental to productivity.

I mean, if I'm trying to design software and write code, or solve math problems, or write an article, the fastest path to completing the task, and doing it error free is going to be to focus on just that one task for as long as possible and get it done, sans distractions.

But CPA seems plausible as well, for entirely different situations. Look at the examples she gives. Talking on the phone will stirring soup. Neither of those tasks do we need to be concerned about productivity or the quality of the output... They are both relatively mindless tasks... Especially the soup stirring. But I would bet that if the phone conversation got intense or required the person to either listen more intently, or think harder while talking, the stirring of the soup would be halted and then resumed once they're back to being mindless again. Or perhaps the person will just keep stirring and stirring and stirring and loose track of the fact that the soup is hot enough and they can stop. I see this all the time.

Same thing with eating lunch and filing papers. No great concentration required there either.

This is like comparing a computer that's multitasking 10 applications that are not CPU intensive... The user sees them all working smoothly and they are all responsive... But if you tried to run two applications at the same time that were doing something heavy duty, like batch processing a large number of images, and another that is running some heavy duty modelling of data... It will probably take longer to multitask than if you just ran one after the other (assuming a single CPU here...)

[Mark Sicignano]

PS - Sorry about the first sentence that I mangled while editing it. And I wasn't even multitasking when I screwed that up.

One more point that I think is important. You end your post with "(Via the believers at Lifehacker.)". I didn't go off to see what the believers are saying, but I can imagine.

I deal with people that think they are great multitaskers... They'll boast about it, "Oh, I'm really good at multitasking." They think that they can doing some thoughtful task, while answering their phones and having instant messaging pop-ups keep stealing their attention. I'll be working with them and I see their focus get broken when a message pops up from the task tray. Their head looks down, back up again, and then they pause for a few seconds and continue... And then I see them make mistakes, and loose track of some fact that they previously had observed.

Despite me pointing out that they just lost their focus, and started making mistakes, these people refuse to admit that maybe they aren't so good at multitasking. It's a matter of pride? Or are they just trying to maintain their consistency and not admit defeat.

FYI: I worked from home today so that I didn't have to go into the office and deal with people who want to interrupt me, phone calls, noise, etc. I got more done as a result.

[Kevin]

Thanks for the comments Mark -- I agree with you. CPA is plausible at some level, and I'm sure there are scientists who already know all this stuff. There's a lot of wishful thinking on the part of multitaskers, though. Not that I haven't made this same mistake...