“Should you really chat while reading?” effects of on-screen multitasking and text disfluency on integrated understanding

Students’ multitasking during lectures or academic assignments is a common activity that may have negative effects on performance. It is therefore relevant to investigate under what conditions such negative effects can be reduced. The current study brought together two separate lines of research to examine the effects of on-screen multitasking and text disfluency. Multitasking required students to read and respond to social media messages during reading. Text disfluency was perceptual in the form of harder-to-read versus easy-to-read text. We included 208 university students, who were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions resulting from a 2 x 2 between-subjects design. Participants read two dual-positional texts on sun exposure and health. Dependent on the assigned condition, they could read perceptually fluent or disfluent texts, and they could intermittently receive, or not receive, on-screen social media messages while reading. As outcome variables, we measured participants’ perception of cognitive load, integrated text understanding, and metacognitive calibration of text understanding. We also controlled the possible contributions of the individual differences of prior knowledge, reading comprehension skills, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Results showed a negative effect of multitasking on the integrated understanding of the dual positional texts with non-multitaskers outperforming multitaskers. Perception of cognitive load and metacognitive calibration were not affected by multitasking. No impact of disfluency was observed for any of the outcome variables, and the interactive effect of multitasking and disfluency was also not statistically significant. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.