Effects Of Media Multitasking Experience On Implicit Memory

Media multitasking refers to the processing of two or more media activities at the same time.With the popularity of electronic devices and the explosive growth of information,it is very common to use multiple media at the same time.A large number of studies have found that media multitasking experience has an important impact on users' cognition.Some studies have found that media multitasking experience can cause users' attention to be more easily distracted.Other studies suggest that it can enhance the range of attention and multi-channel perception.However,most of the existing studies focus on the impact of media multitasking experience on focused attention,while the impact on distributed attention remains to be explored.Other studies have found that media multitasking experience can damage explicit memory,but the effect on implicit memory is not clear.Implicit memory plays an important role in the process of human-computer interaction.Contextual cueing paradigm is a classic research paradigm of visual implicit memory.Previous researches on Contextual cueing effect mainly focused on how to learn the scene without limiting eye movement;Some studies also found that in the process of visual search,by limiting eye movement,participants can be forced to use distract attention to learn the Contextual cueing effect,and can improve the flexibility of implicit knowledge.Therefore,this study adopts the contextual cueing effect paradigm,combined with eye tracking technology and learning-test paradigm,to limit the subjects' eye movement in the learning phase and the test phase respectively,in order to investigate whether there are differences in the learning and expression ability of implicit memory between subjects with different media multitasking experiences under the condition of focused attention and distributed attention.In Experiment 1,33 college students were recruited and divided into two groups: high media multitasking experience group(HMMs)and low media multitasking experience group(LMMS)by using the media use questionnaire.The effect of media multitasking experience on implicit memory was investigated by using the contextual cueing effect paradigm.In the learning phase,the subjects can freely observe the scene to search for the target,while in the test phase,the subjects' fixation is limited to the center of the scene,and they are required to search for the target by using the surrounding field of vision.The results showed that both groups showed contextual cueing effect in learning phase.In the test phase,only HMMs maintained the contextual cueing effect,while the contextual cueing effect of LMMS disappeared.In Experiment 2,35 college students were recruited.They were also divided into groups according to media multitasking experience.The effect of media multitasking experience on implicit memory was investigated through contextual cueing effect.In contrast to experiment 1,in the learning phase,the subjects' fixation was limited to the center of the scene,and they were required to use the surrounding visual field to search for the target.In the test phase,the subjects were free to observe the scene and search for the target.The results showed that only HMMs group showed background cue effect in learning phase.In the test phase,both groups showed background cue effect.These results indicate that there is no difference in implicit memory performance between HMMs and LMMS in both learning and testing phases under the condition of focused attention(without eye movement restriction).However,under the condition of distracted attention(limited eye movement),the implicit memory performance of HMMs was better than that of LMMS in both learning and testing phases.The results show that HMMs can perform implicit memory tasks better under the condition of distributed attention.The results of this study increase our understanding of how media multitasking experience affects implicit memory,and provide some inspiration for user experience design for different media multitasking experiences.