Students' multitasking during lectures or academic assignments is a common activity that may have negative effects on performance. It is therefore relevant to investigate under what conditions such negative effects can be reduced. The current study brought together two separate lines of research to examine the effects of on-screen multitasking and text disfluency. Multitasking required students to read and respond to social media messages during reading. Text disfluency was perceptual in the form of harder-to-read versus easy-to-read text. We included 208 university students, who were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions resulting from a 2 x 2 between-subjects design. Participants read two dual-positional texts on sun exposure and health. Dependent on the assigned condition, they could read perceptually fluent or disfluent texts, and they could intermittently receive, or not receive, on-screen social media messages while reading. As outcome variables, we measured participants’ perception of cognitive load, integrated text understanding, and metacognitive calibration of text understanding. We also controlled the possible contributions of the individual differences of prior knowledge, reading comprehension skills, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Results showed a negative effect of multitasking on the integrated understanding of the dual positional texts with non-multitaskers outperforming multitaskers. Perception of cognitive load and metacognitive calibration were not affected by multitasking. No impact of disfluency was observed for any of the outcome variables, and the interactive effect of multitasking and disfluency was also not statistically significant. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

中文翻译：

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“你真的应该边读边聊吗？”屏幕上的多任务处理和文本不流畅性对综合理解的影响


学生在讲座或学术作业期间进行多任务处理是一项常见的活动，可能会对表现产生负面影响。因此，研究在什么条件下可以减少这种负面影响是相关的。目前的研究汇集了两条独立的研究路线，以检查屏幕上多任务处理和文本不流畅的影响。多任务处理要求学生在阅读过程中阅读和回复社交媒体消息。文本不流畅性以更难阅读的文本与易于阅读的文本的形式存在。我们纳入了 208 名大学生，他们被随机分配到 2 x 2 受试者间设计产生的四种情况之一。参与者阅读了两篇关于阳光照射和健康的双位置文本。根据分配的条件，他们可以阅读感知流利或不流利的文本，并且他们可以在阅读时间歇性地接收或不接收屏幕上的社交媒体消息。作为结果变量，我们测量了参与者对认知负荷的感知、综合文本理解和文本理解的元认知校准。我们还控制了先验知识、阅读理解技能、工作记忆和认知灵活性的个体差异的可能贡献。结果显示，多任务处理对双重位置文本的综合理解有负面影响，非多任务处理者的表现优于多任务处理者。认知负荷的感知和元认知校准不受多任务处理的影响。对于任何结果变量，均未观察到流畅度的影响，并且多任务处理和不流畅度的交互效应也没有统计学意义。讨论了未来研究的局限性和方向。