Human multitasking can be described as a characteristic that stands for people being capable of completing more than one task at the same time. Even though it derives from computer-based multitasking, it is different because human contexts tend to switch more often than their digital counterparts. Accordingly, insufficient attention causes humans to lose focus and spend more time instead (Ong & Gupta, 2016). The ability to train to multitask is a relevant research question that is addressed to help humans improve coordination and avoid interruptions.
One example of multitasking being a beneficial human capability is the growing flexibility of a person’s approach to the tasks they have to accomplish. For example, when a human is behind the wheel rather often, they quickly learn to pay enough attention to all the traffic signs and sidewalks while also talking to passengers or listening to music (Courage et al., 2015). Another possible advantage is an improved ability to mobilize mental capacities. In line with Ong and Gupta (2016), constant challenges are essential if the person in question wants to achieve outstanding results and maintain their performance.
The key reason why multitasking could become a detriment to some people is the growing impact of motivation issues. The more a person gets involved in short-run multitasking, the more they will become demotivated when employing multitasking for lengthy and resource-intensive objectives (Courage et al., 2015). The most evident problem with multitasking is that the quality of one’s work is going to drop crucially over time since one will not have the time to refill energy and motivation. The lower performance will lead to stagnation and poor lifestyle choices, affecting people around the procrastinator.
It may be safe enough to say that Ben is not going to succeed when trying to multitask between activities that require him to appeal to the same areas of the brain and persistently reconnect to two diverse discussions. The first reason why multitasking is going to fail is that Ben is going to face a distracted focus and have trouble switching between tasks. He is not a trained individual, so the most prominent outcomes for him would be the loss of time and the inability to follow the track of discussion in both groups. When a person does not switch correctly, they will overlook essential links between important information and cause trouble for the team during the later stages of the project.
Another essential problem that will have to be addressed by Ben is his contribution to an unpleasant working atmosphere. As an individual that will have to go back and forth between discussions to learn all the required information, Ben is most likely to affect other people’s ability to focus and generate a hostile working environment where most of the participants will not be focused on studying. The fact that Ben is not going to provide his peers with enough assistance will turn him into a pariah across both teams due to the perceived selfishness and disrespect displayed by Ben.
While not having any background information on Ben’s training and education, it may be possible to hypothesize that he never had in his life trained to multitask before. This is a cornerstone of Ben’s performance because he will not be suitable for constant focus switches and the need to keep plenty of information inside his short-term memory. The mental capacity has to be powerful enough to help Ben cope with both projects at the same time, but successful outcomes are rather unlikely. The best way for Ben would be to complete one project at a time and practice multitasking in his spare time.
According to Nelson et al. (2011), change blindness is one of the most important phenomena in work with eyewitnesses because quite a few wrongful convictions have been permitted because of the faulty nature of human memory. This is a crucial insight into human attention and awareness that makes it safe to suggest that further understanding of cognitive errors and their consequences would be required. The literature on change blindness and evidence on eyewitness identification have to be linked even closer to help avoid wrongful convictions in the future (Nelson et al., 2011). On the other hand, human perception could be researched from a completely different angle, with change blindness and conscious awareness being on both sides of the scale. It could be thought-provoking to complete additional research on the topic of observers sensing certain changes while not consciously seeing them in the overall picture.
As per the information shared by Loftus et al. (2013), eyewitness research heavily relies on forensic technologies and develops an environment where digital solutions quickly displace human error caused by mistakes in awareness and perception. This approach to eradicating wrongful convictions proved to be rather successful and taught numerous actors in the field of criminal justice that faulty eyewitness testimony cannot serve as an acceptable source of evidence anymore. Under the influence of the voice of the community, many scholars chose to pay attention to wrongful convictions and prevent such negative scenarios from happening in the future (Loftus et al., 2013). Accordingly, there are plenty of miscarriages of justice that have to be linked to the inability or unwillingness of criminal justice representatives to gain more insight into human perception and awareness before making specific decisions that could damage one’s reputation and lead to imprisonment.
References
Courage, M. L., Bakhtiar, A., Fitzpatrick, C., Kenny, S., & Brandeau, K. (2015). Growing up multitasking: The costs and benefits for cognitive development.Developmental Review, 35, 5-41.
Loftus, E. F. (2013). 25 years of eyewitness science…Finally pays off. Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 8(5), 556-557.
Nelson, K. J., Laney, C., Fowler, N. B., Knowles, E. D., Davis, D., & Loftus, E. F. (2011). Change blindness can cause mistaken eyewitness identification.Legal and Criminological Psychology, 16(1), 62-74.
Ong, Y. S., & Gupta, A. (2016). Evolutionary multitasking: A computer science view of cognitive multitasking.Cognitive Computation, 8(2), 125-142.