In 2010 in the first controlled study of the phenomenon of

In 2010, in the first controlled study of the phenomenon of over-tasking, Strayer and Jason Watson, a cognitive neuroscientist, asked two hundred participants to take a standardized driving test, which they had previously used to illustrate the dangers of multitasking. And we tend to overestimate our ability to multitask. When “he” and “his” colleague at the University of Utah, social psychologist David Sanbomnatsu, asked more than 300 students to rate their ability to multitask, and then compared those scores to students’ actual multitasking performance, they found a strong correlation: an inverse correlation. With a decidedly small sample size, Strayer and “his” team have already found that supertaskers exhibit different patterns of neural activation than most of us do when it comes to multitasking. In 2012, David Strayer observed something in a research lab in the suburbs of London that “he” had never known: extraordinary multitasking. In another paper published by Stanford University, a group of neuroscientists found that strong multitaskers – people used to multitasking simultaneously – performed worse than weak multitaskers on measures of executive control and effective task-switching. Working with psychologists at Newcastle University in Australia, Strayer and “his” team at the University of Utah recently worked on a Web-based version of the over-tasking test. When Strayer and “his” colleagues observed 56,000 drivers approaching an intersection, they found that drivers using cell phones were twice as likely to ignore stop signs. According to Strayer, multitasking is not part of the normal distribution, just as birth weight is, with even the lightest and heaviest children falling into a relatively narrow range around average height. About five years ago, Strayer recalls, “he” and “his” colleagues parsed the data and noticed an anomaly: a participant whose score did not worsen when multiple tasks were added. More recently, Strayer became interested in people who drive while talking on the phone. In 2012, after testing Cassie and “her” other British colleagues, Strayer’s team identified nineteen over-taskers in a sample of seven hundred people. Strayer believes that there is a small but persistent group–about two percent–in which performance not only does not deteriorate, but may even improve when their attention is repeatedly demanded. Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, has spent “his” entire career studying how attention works and how it doesn’t work.