Abstract—Information era of fragmentation, multitasking behavior has been occupying our lives in many aspects, especially on Internet. This research focuses on the unsynchronized online multitasking, which called task switching, to explore switching paths and individual differences in multitasking behaviors. We distinguish between switching frequency and task completion quality in task switching behaviors. The online tasks are classified to cognitive task, emotional task and social task in this study. A total of 145 college students participated in experiments and psychological questionnaires. This research found: an emotional task tends to switch to a cognitive task, a cognitive task tends to switch to an emotional task, and the possibility of a social task switching to the other two types tends to equality. In the different experimental groups, namely extraversion, neuroticism, anxiety, cognitive style, work memory span are all significant correlated with the task switch times, and extraversion, neuroticism, anxiety are significant correlated with task completion quality. We also found the existences of the transit task and the following task in task switching behavior.
Index Terms—Multimedia, multitasking, online behavior, task switching.
The authors are with the Communication and Journalism Department, Nanjing University, No.22, Rd. Hankou, Nanjing, 210093, China (e-mail: npchao@nju.edu.cn, 849141952@qq.com, eu41@live.cn).
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Cite:Naipeng Chao, Cheng Wang, and Yi Li, "Task Switching in Online Multitasking Behaviors," Journal of Advances in Computer Networks vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 75-79, 2016.
