A story in the New York Times argues for the benefits of "untasking," or mindfulness, in everyday life. Mindfulness meditation is a practice in which people focus on their immediate experience (such as their breath), while acknowledging and releasing any thoughts that come up.
According to the story, mindfulness might have helped build the concentration and focus of the fictional character Sherlock Holmes.
Can people develop Sherlock Holmes-style powers of concentration? That's what the NYT editorial argued, using psychological science as evidence. Here is an example of one study cited in the article:
In 2012, researchers ...asked a group of human resources professionals to engage in the type of simultaneous planning they did habitually. Each participant was placed in a one-person office, with a laptop and a phone, and asked to complete several typical tasks: schedule meetings for multiple attendees, locate free conference rooms, write a memo that proposed a creative agenda item and the like.... The list was supposed to be completed in 20 minutes or less.
After the multitasking free-for-all, participants were divided into three groups: one was assigned to an eight-week meditation course (two hours of instruction, weekly); another group didn’t take the course at first, but took it later; and the last group took an eight-week course in body relaxation. Everyone was put through a second round of frenzy.
The only participants to show improvement were those who had received the mindfulness training. Not only did they report fewer negative emotions at the end of the assignment, but their ability to concentrate improved significantly. They could stay on task longer and they switched between tasks less frequently. While the overall time they devoted to the assignment didn’t differ much from that of other groups, they spent it more efficiently. They engaged, on average, in just over 40 discreet “tasks” — test-related behaviors that had a definable start and end time — spending approximately 36 seconds on each, in contrast to the 48 to 50 average tasks attempted by the other groups — with an average of only 30 seconds spent per activity. They also remembered what they did better than the other participants in the study.
a) What kind of study is this? (Experiment or correlational study?)
Okay, I'll give you a hint: It's an experiment! But what makes it an experiment?
b) What are the independent and dependent variables? (There are several dependent variables--I count at least four. Try to locate all of them.)
c) What kind of experiment is it? Pre-test posttest? Posttest only? Repeated measures? Concurrent measures?
d) Sketch a graph of the result from this study. There are several dependent variables--choose one to graph. And though you don't have the actual data, you can estimate the pattern of results from the text in the article.
e) Assuming that the group of participants was randomly assigned to the three independent variable conditions, can you support the causal statement that "Mindfulness training helps people become better multitaskers?" Apply the three causal rules of covariance, temporal precedence, and internal validity.
If you're interested in the full article, read it here. There are a couple of other studies included in the piece.
