| With the rapid development of the information age,media multitasking has gradually become a habitual media usage method for contemporary college students,that was,individuals operating multiple media tasks or using the media to perform multiple tasks within the same time period.There have been many foreign studies about the influence of media multitasking behavior on individual learning performance and cognitive ability,but the current conclusion has not yet been unified.The mind wandering referred to the fact that in the idle state or when completing a certain task,the individual's consciousness was dissociated from the current environment or task,and pointed to the phenomenon of internal thinking,fantasy,feelings,or other things that nothing with the task.It would have a negative impact on the smooth experience and performance of individual targets and tasks.At the same time,frequent mind wandering reflected individual weakness in attention and execution control.This study combined the background of the times,set web-based text reading as the main task,simulated college students' daily screen reading situations,and used a questionnaire survey method to explore the influence of multitasking behaviors on mind wandering while reading.It aimed to clarify the mechanism of interaction between the two,and provided more reliable evidence that the frequent media multitasking behavior would weaken individuals' cognitive functions related to attentive and executive control.At the same time,we wanted to provide more reasonable suggestions for individuals with high-intensity media multitasking behaviors,especially for individuals who were used to reading on the Internet.And we could also provide references for future research.Study 1 was a questionnaire,which used the Media Use Questionnaire(MUQ)to survey 134 college students from a university in Wuhan.Afterwards,experiment 1 was conducted to explore the impact of media multitasking on mind wandering while reading.This experiment was designed for single-factor participants.66 subjects were randomly assigned to no media multitasking group(control group)and arbitrary multitasking group(experimental group),33 individuals for each group,the incidence of mind wandering was the dependent variable.Next,based on the Media Multitasking Index(MMI)scores measured in the MUQ,56 subjects were selected from the high and low 27% of the subjects for experiment 2,and the inclusion of material difficulty(easy vs.difficult)as an intragroup variable.The media multitasking behavioral level(high VS low)was used as the intergroup variable,and the incidence of mind wandering was the dependent variable.The research finally got the following conclusions:1.The shortest weekly time for college students to conduct media activities was 11.5 hours,the longest being 171.5 hours,and spending an average of 10.39 hours per day.The media types that used the most time were instant messaging,surfing the Internet and print media.The ones that took the least time were listening to audio without music,watching TV,and sending e-mail.2.The media multitasking index was 3.64,which meant that individuals performed about 4 media activities at same time.Among them,multitasking behaviors were most likely to occur in the form of web-based media,such as surfing the Internet and instant messaging.In addition,the media multitasking index were significantly different on the network age,and the media multitasking index of individuals with had longer network ages was significantly higher than that of individuals with shorter network ages.3.Compared with a single reading task,individuals who had multitasking media during the reading process would exhibit more mind wandering.4.Media multitasking behavior had a significant main effect on mind wandering while reading,Individuals with higher levels of media multitasking would show more mind wandering during reading.5.material difficulty had a significant main effect on mind wandering while reading,the incidence of mind wandering was significantly higher when individuals read difficult materials than easy materials.6.Media multitasking behavior and material difficulty had a significant interaction on mind wandering while reading.while reading easy materials,the incidence of mind wandering in high-level multitasking was significantly higher.While reading difficult materials,there was no significant difference in the incidence of mind wandering between individuals with high and low levels. |
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