Media multitasking performance: Role of message relevance and formatting cues in online environments

In this study, strategies involving use of message relevance and formatting cues were tested with the objective of enhancing media multitasking performance. Three memory measures, free recall, aided/cued recall, and recognition were used as dependent variables for the study.The results indicated that multitasking was associated with reduced memory performance for all the dependent measures. Similarly, the performance for high relevance messages was significantly higher than the performance for low relevance messages across all memory measures. Additional analyses revealed that people made more errors during recognition tasks during multitasking. Similarly, more people made errors in free recall tasks during multitasking.Overall, findings suggested that multitasking might have more negative influence on message processing in some contexts than others.

• Influence of multitasking on message processing performance was tested.
• Media multitasking was associated with decrease in message processing performance.
• Main effects of message relevance and multitasking on message memory were observed.
• Higher errors rates in recognition were observed for multitasking condition.
• Higher frequency of recall errors was observed for multitasking condition.