Cognitive Design

Instant messaging (IM) on computers and text messaging on phones is now an important form of communication. It happens everywhere and often concurrently or while people are doing other things such as studying, readings, attending a class, attending a meeting at work, driving a car or watching TV. This raises an important cognitive design question:

Should we redesign experiences to better support concurrent instant messaging, and if so, what do the new experiences look like?

For example, rather than banning IM in the classroom or corporate meeting room, should we rethink these activities to directly integrate IM? 

To take a cognitive approach to this question we need to understand what psychological needs IM meets and how it otherwise impacts perception, memory, thinking, learning, mood and interaction.  

I’ve been collecting research on this issue for sometime and just found an interesting article in the February issue of Cyberpsychology & Behavior on Distractions, Distractions: Does Instant Messaging Affect College Students’ Performance on a Concurrent Reading Comprehension Task?

The authors found that IM while reading slows you down but does not interfere with reading comprehension unless you really do a lot of it.

 Here is the abstract from the study:

 ” Instant messaging (IM) has become one of the most popular forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and is especially prevalent on college campuses. Previous research suggests that IM users often multitask while conversing online. To date, no one has yet examined the cognitive effect of concurrent IM use. Participants in the present study (N= 69) completed a reading comprehension task uninterrupted or while concurrently holding an IM conversation. Participants who IMed while performing the reading task took significantly longer to complete the task, indicating that concurrent IM use negatively affects efficiency. Concurrent IM use did not affect reading comprehension scores. Additional analyses revealed that the more time participants reported spending on IM, the lower their reading comprehension scores. Finally, we found that the more time participants reported spending on IM, the lower their self-reported GPA. Implications and future directions are discussed. “

I’d like to hear from others that have found solid research on the cognitive impact of concurrent IM.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Design, Service Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.