KMDI Speaker Series: Danielle Lottridge

The Psychology of Multitasking

Danielle Lottridge, Ph.D.
Affiliations:Stanford University & San Francisco State University

Abstract: Chronic multitaskers perform worse on core multitasking skills despite feeling more confident in their abilities (Ophir, Nass & Wagner, 2009). In this talk, Dr. Lottridge discusses three projects on the psychology of multitasking: a browser redesign and field study (Lottridge et al., 2012), an experiment examining the surprising effect of distractors on essay writing (chronic multitaskers do better in certain conditions!), and preliminary results of an fMRI study.

Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 37, 15583–15587.

Lottridge, D., Marschner, E., Wang, E., Romanovsky, M., and Nass, C. (2012) Browser Design Impacts Multitasking, In Proc. of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 56th Annual Meeting HFES 2012, 1957-1961.

Bio: Dr. Danielle Lottridge received her Ph.D. in Human Factors in 2010 from the University of Toronto and recently completed a 2-year post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University on multitasking. Her interests include wellness, health, and applied psychology. She is currently taking graduate coursework in clinical psychology at San Francisco State University.