The Research On The Relationship Between Media Multitasking And Creativity

Media Multitasking is an act of consuming multiple media simultaneously.It showed that long term multimedia activities could influence individuals' cognitive task performances.For example,Greater self-report media multitasking has been associated with a number of undesirable.characteristics,such as inability to filter out distracting information,thus cause decreased performance on cognitive executive tasks.This research aims to discover the relationship between long term media multitasking and individuals' daily creativity.Daily creativity includes creative behavior and creative thought.There are two typical types of creative thought,divergent thinking and convergent thinking.In a divergent task and daily creative behaviors,it was an advantage if there are more irrelevant information to employ because it helps to build distant links between distracted stimulators and target stimulators.While in a convergent task,it's better to exclude irrelevant stimulators in order to find the best cognitive representation for a question.So,we speculate that media multitasking could have different impact on different types of creativity.Specifically,high media multitaskers have better performance on daily creative behaviors and divergent thinking,while have decreased performance on a convergent task.To check this hypothesis,we designed three studies:In study 1,we employed a survey method to explore the relationship between media multitasking and daily creative behaviors,and we found positive correlation between them.In study 2,we employed eye tracking method to check the relationship between the irrelevant processing and divergent thinking.It came out that higher media multitaskers had better performance in the low relevance distractor condition while lower media multitaskers had better performance in the non distractor condition.Besides,we found that higher media multitaskers had longer mean fixed duration on the distractors than the targets.In study 3,we employed the eye tracking method to explore the relationship between divergent thinking and but failed to find any difference on convergent creative performance between low media multitaskers and higher media multitaskers.Based on the studies above,we can conclude:(1)Higher media multitaskers have more daily creative behaviors;(2)Higher media multitaskers influence the divergent thinking performance by altering the attention to irrelevant stimulators;(3)Media multitasking have no significant influence on convergent thinking.