Changed detection: No relationship between working memory and media usage in Covid-era and contemporary young adults

A decade ago, the widespread adoption of smartphones prompted research assessing the effects of media multitasking on cognitive performance. Early findings showed that high media multitasking imposed a significant cost to attention and executive function. Here, we revisited whether the harmful effects of media multitasking persist in digital native undergraduates, in whom nearly all media usage involves multitasking. We investigated the relationship between media usage and working memory (WM) performance. Across six experiments, we conducted online and in-person testing, using simultaneous or sequentially presented visual or auditory stimuli in tasks with and without distractors to test for attentional filtering. We verified media usage data from participants' devices. In addition, because we previously observed WM deficits in undergraduates with a self-reported history of mild traumatic brain injury (hmTBI; > 1 year prior), we tested whether hmTBI participants were more sensitive to high media usage. In contrast to prominent earlier findings, the current results identified no significant relationship between media usage and WM performance for hmTBI or control participants. Bayes factors support the null hypothesis: in these undergraduates, media usage does not affect WM performance. The one positive finding showed that hmTBI participants exhibit less media usage. We speculate that early results captured effects in the "transitional generation," and these effects are now resolved earlier in development. Alternatively, the brief engagement required by various media notifications may benefit WM, in particular. More research, including various cohorts, is needed to understand the long-term effects of media integration across cognitive domains.