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🎤 Vocab

❗ Information

Cognitive costs of everyday technology use: Attention, multitasking, and stress

Gloria Mark, Ph.D.
Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics, University of California, Irvine

✒️ -> Scratch Notes

“My experience is what I agree to attend to” - William James
Also him:

“Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind… Focalization…”

Technology allows us to do more, but how do we account for the human bottleneck?

Attention and Tech Use:

Our emotions (stress from overload)
Unconscious actions (System I)
Algorithms
Communication media which are social systems
Personality (differences in self-regulation)
- The big five:
  - conscienscess people use email significantly more.
    - Why? Make sure nothing gets through the cracks
  - Neurotics: shorter attention spans. Tend to replay events in your head. Interferes with ability to pay attention
Our broader media environment
- Film & TV have adapted to modern attentions (faster editing, etc.)
  - “Chaos editing”
Al

Studying people in labs has limitations, instead study people where they are. “I create living laboratories”

Sens cams: Lightweight cams around your neck that senses when a face to face interaction is happening

Experience sampling probes: Subjective surveys of peoples reported experience. Periodically survey

Daily Screen Switching

Average:

change screens 566 / day
check email 77 / day

About half of interruptions are self-initiatied

‘Working intensely on a word document, then suddenly start checking email, phone, social media, etc’
- no stimulus causing this
Reported reasons:
- Bored
- Thought popped into head (needed to search something)
- Habit

When external interruptions decrease, internal interruptions rise

SUPER INTERESTING
Is ADHD addaptive for technology?? Otherwise so consuming people NEED to interrupt themselves?? SICK AS HELL RESULT

Whaat? This is crazy 90% has to be a incorrect result. That’s insane

Attention is not a binary state of being focused and unfocused

we exert different amounts of mental effort
- Solitare? low mental effort

People are happiest doing easy rote activity (in valence):

Focused: 34.49
Rote: 77.36
Bored: 18.82

Physicians, email, and stress

One month observing 1275 PCPs
Average daily EHR Inbox use:

52 ½ minutes during work hours
19 minutes outside of work hours
More time on inbox:
females
had more patient encounters
had higher percentage of female, older patients

47 physicians wore HR sensors 7 days:
More stress with:

Higher Inbox use
Outside workhours

Not correlational, CAUSATIONAL. Cutting off email reduced stress

Attention and device usage in the classroom

14 week study: 84 college freshman

(software in phone used to record device usage, not contents just level of phone activity)
Phones used in 90% of their classes
28% of actual class duration

Lower grades correlated with:

Higher overall daily time on smartphone (avg. 5.78 hrs)
Higher classroom daily time on smartphones (more time texting)

Study is awaiting replication and causation experiment

Myth of Multitasking: We don’t achieve more

You can multitask with an automatic task, like walking.
When the task becomes manual, we have to manually switch tasks

More errors:

Physician errors in 208/239 prescriptions
More time:
Switch cost
More stress
Both objective and subjective measures

Multitasking: More stress:

Correlation of window switching and stress
Higher systolic and diastolic blood pressure
Physiological marker indicates stress
Higher perceived stress

Emotions when multitasking:

(had a task with interruption, measured emotions with facial recognition software)

When interrupted:

People worked significantly faster
- “I interpret this as speeding up work because of the knowledge they will be interrupted”
Reported significantly higher:
- Stress
- Mental workload
- Frustration
- Time pressure
- Effort
  Measured with NASA survey?

AI and attention

600 summaries: 40 Students, 10 wks

First, summaries on their own
Next, summaries with ChatGPT.
Then, they revised their original summaries.
Last, they evaluated their experience.

Depth of processing:

Understanding is related to the amount of effore you invest into processing the information
AI reduces this

Use of AI correlated with weaker cognitive reasoning

People need to think more than just minimally, which is our natural tendency. It is our ability to think independently and actively, to exercise our thinking and judging faculties that make us human.
-Hannah Arendt

Interviews

50+ partcicipants asked to walk through a typical day of technology use in detail

Responses clustered into groups:

Conscious intent vs automatic use
Effortful use vs ease

Attention is goal-directed

Switchbot (chatbot agent, identify user goals for next day)
- Emotional and task goals are important
When goals were brought up again, attention increase
- Short lived though
- Following hour effective, but effect tapered off

Habit diminishes the conscious attention at which acts are performed- William James

Solutions?

Meta-awareness is a skill you can develop

Double check before pulling out phone, do I need this right now?

Use forethought

Consider rhythm of attention

Don’t use social media when you’re at you peak

Importance of breaks: yohaku no bi

Beauty in emptyness
Space around a figure is as important as the figure itself. Think about our day like this
Consciously incorporate empty space

Substack: www.gloriamark.substack.com
Website: www.gloriamark.com
Book: Attention Span - Gloria Mark. PhD

🧪 -> Refresh the Info

Did you generally find the overall content understandable or compelling or relevant or not, and why, or which aspects of the reading were most novel or challenging for you and which aspects were most familiar or straightforward?)

Did a specific aspect of the reading raise questions for you or relate to other ideas and findings you’ve encountered, or are there other related issues you wish had been covered?)

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