Can “Stay Online” Reduce Our Work Performance?

Due to the prevalence of mobile devices, more and more people are getting used to switch among different electronic devices during work, such as computers, mobile phones, iPads. Some argue that the multitasking ability allows them to complete multiple tasks at the same time and improve work efficiency. As opposed to this type of view, other people think that due to the limited capacity of attention and memory, switching among different interfaces damages the performance of each individual task. However, simply staying online does not provide such severe consequence. In order to investigate the effect of “stay online” or switching among different electronic interfaces on performances, this study explored the effects of memory maintaining and updating by using the memory updating paradigm. The results showed that the maintenance of other objects delayed the process of memory updating. Moreover, as the number of items increased, users' performances were damaged along with increased reaction time and reduced accuracy. Interestingly, when the number of items maintained in working memory reached a certain level, participants' response time would no longer increase, and subjects could not switch among these items correctly either. These results indicated that only “stay online”, with the presence of other media, would reduce the work performance, but if users did not switch among different items, the impact of media numbers would not affect the efficiency of work. But due to the switching cost, if people need to switch among different media in the work, their performances must be damaged, which might result in extended working hours and increased errors.