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Disadvantages Of Task Switching

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Abstract Task switching is an aspect of everyday life and I’m certain everyone has been in a situation where they were required to juggle between multiple tasks, having their attention being shifted from one thing to another. This phenomenon of task switching is a topic of interest for many researchers and many have studied the influence of task-switching on people’s performance. For instance, researchers like Stephen Monsell (2003) have conducted experiments that required participants to switch habitually between small tasks and found that constant switching between tasks caused more errors and their responses were significantly slower. To test this task set reconfiguration theory, Brooklyn College students conducted their own …show more content…

While you’re munching on your snack, listening to Mariah Carey in the background, and typing up that paper; your phone rings and you pick it up and start a conversation. Ever wonder why you got that C- on that paper or missed the deadline to submit your paper for work? Because you’ve been a victim of task switching. Task switching is defined as having the ability to perform two or more tasks simultaneously; where you switch from one task to another in a rapid succession. You may know task switching as multi-tasking but the term multi-tasking is actually misleading because you can 't actually do more than one cognitive task at a time; instead we switch tasks, therefore “task switching” is a more appropriate term to use. This phenomenon should be relevant to everybody because everyone partakes in task switching in their daily lives. Task switching should be understood and done when appropriate. People fail to realize that our brains cannot fully focus on more than one thing at a time. Switching between tasks can impair our performance and it can even be dangerous. For example, people can text and drive and get into accidents, or text while crossing the street and potentially getting hit by a car. The purpose of the current experiment done by Brooklyn College students is to measure task switching using laboratory

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