Video games allow for multitasking? A review of "Improving multi-tasking ability through action videogames"

Would you believe that playing video games could make you more likely to succeed as a pilot?

There's been quite a bit of colloquial evidence on multitasking and task-switching floating around the internet recently, thanks in no small part to work by Ophir et al., (2009) who showed that people who are habitual media-multitaskers (i.e. those annoying people who text while watching a movie or even worse while driving) tend to perform worse on a wide variety of cognitive measures of attention.  They concluded that people who are chronic media multitaskers have a "leaky filter", and as such cannot block out irrelevant (and distracting) information.  This agrees nicely other theories of attention, and particularly inhibitory theory (Hasher & Zacks, Michael C. Anderson, Gazzaley).

One reason that multitasking has come under such scrutiny is that it is now encouraged and even expected in many professions and by many employers.  Even in situations where multitasking is not encouraged or is recognized as being detrimental to overall performance, it is often seen as unavoidable.  There are now numerous studies  examining the dangers of multitasking.  One of the primary issues is that practitioners tend to forget to pick up a task or thread again after switching away from it.  In medicine, this can lead to patient danger and deaths, and in the aviation industry, it can lead to crashes.

That said, if one has to multitask, it is probably better to do it well and without discernable decrement to either of the tasks being juggled.  This is where Chiappe et al.,'s study comes in.  Theirs is the first study I know of that looks at multitasking ability longitudinally and it's interaction with playing action video games.  Not just any video game will do mind you - it has to be action video games since these are the ones that improve reflexes and automatic processes - in this case, they were asked to play first person shooter games for a minimum of 5 hours a week for ten weeks.  Participants were split into two groups.  Half were trained with video games and the other half served as controls - more on this later.  Both groups completed a multitasking test at baseline and 10 weeks later.

The results are pretty spectacular.  Not only does the videogame group show faster reaction times the second time around, but their responses are more stable, and there are fewer errors overall (see below).

The issue I have with this paper is with the control group.  If you're a scientist, one of the biggest hurdles in designing an experiment is deciding what the appropriate baseline or "control" is for your particular question. Common practice used to be that you would simply apply a manipulation to one group and leave the other group untouched or pristine.  This has recently come under fire since it is now recognized that simply by bringing participants into the laboratory and lavishing extra attention on them, and having them feel that they are improving, or doing something productive can act as a placebo effect.

In other words, unless you give the control group something equally as demanding and engaging to do (in this case perhaps a strategy based computer game that relies less on reflexes), you cannot be sure whether to attribute the difference to the experimental manipulation, or to the contextual differences between the groups.

That said, this study is still interesting enough that its' findings should be pursued further and replicated with a more stringent control.  If replicated, the finding promises to amend the largely negative literature on multitasking and suggests that those of us who are "experts" at multitasking might not suffer when doing so - a revelation that might shift the focus from minimizing the amount of multitasking people do, to strategies that make them effective multitaskers.



Chiappe, D., Conger, M., Liao, J., Caldwell, J. L., & Vu, K.-P. L. (2012). Improving multi-tasking ability through action videogames. Applied ergonomics, 1–7. doi:10.1016/j.apergo.2012.08.002

Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. D. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(37), 15583–15587. doi:10.1073/pnas.0903620106