| In the information era of fragmentation,as well as distractibility,multitasking behavior has been occupying our lifes in many aspects,especially the college students,they always immerse in multitasking and are more better on doing more than one task at the same time.As an old phenomenon,the multitasking exists in every corner of the life,its significance is rediscovered in the era of new communication technology updating quickly.Due to the increasing attention on traffic safety, and the efficiency in the workplace or classroom,multitasking has already appealed the interests of the researchers from cognitive psychology, information science,communication and so on.In the field of communication,most of the scant relevant researches put attention on the negative impact of the multitasking,however,the research focusing on the multitasking itself is rare.On the other hand,most of the relevant researches put attention on the offline multitasking,or the online and offline interactive multitasking,while the research on the online multitasking is scarce.This research focuses on the online multitasking of the college students.Multitasking can be classified to the synchronized and the unsynchronized,this thesis focuses on the latter one,it sees multitasking an switching from one task to another in rapid succession rather than the concurrent performance of two or more tasks,not doing more than one task at the same time.The task type in previous studies can not be accepted entirely.Considering the study background and based on the experience of previous studies, the tasks are classified to cognitive task,emotional task,and social task in this study.145 college students of the Nanjing University are investigated through the experiment and questionnaire survey to outline the basic prospect of the college students’multitasking during internet use.Does the path of task switching keep to a constant rule? How is the relation between the multitasking performance and the individual difference of the college students?The questionnaire is used to measure the subjects’extraversion, neuroticism,sensation-seeking,self-efficacy,anxiety,and the cognitive style,work menmory span are measured by single computer programs respectively.Eight experiments, which priamary tasks are the above-mentioned three types respectively,are implemented.The cognitive task includes two experimental groups,low cognitive difficulty and high cognitive difficulty.The emotional task includes four experimental groups,strong positive emotion,strong negative emotion,weak positive emotion and weak nagetive emotion.The social task includes two experimental groups,low social difficulty and high social difficulty.In addition.a reference group is implemented.The main body of the experiment is a given task, which needs 15 to 25 minutes to accomplish,ad in different group there are different tasks.This duration of this section is 1 hour,and the remaining time ensure the subjects to operate task switching.The findings show that the emotional task tends to switch to the cognitive task,the cognitive task tends to switch to the emotional task,and the possibility of the social task switching to the other two types tends to equality.In the different experimental groups,extraversion,neuroticism,anxiety,cognitive style,work memory span are all significant correlated with the task switch times,and extraversion,neuroticism,anxiety are significant correlated with the accomplishment of task. |
