Sarayu Caulfield and Alexandra Ulmer, two high school students from Portland Oregon, presented their research study — Capacity Limits of Working Memory: The Impact of Multitasking on Cognitive Control and Emotion Recognition in the Adolescent Mind — at the American Society of Pediatrics conference this past weekend. Basically, they discovered that media multitasking works for some teens.

Their study involved 196 females and 207 males, ages ranging from 10 to 19 years old, who were analyzed based on their media usage using the Stanford Multitasking Media Index, and characterized as high or low media multitaskers. Then, they were sent into one of two rooms, 50% to each: one in which tasks were done sequentially, without other media, and a second room in which tasks were accomplished simultaneously with auditory, visual, and cognitive tasks.

The results? The

As the authors wrote in an abstract,

Those with habitual high use of multiple media were better able to filter out distracting irrelevant tasks, but surprisingly performed worse when they were not pursuing multiple tasks. In other words, they were better at multitasking, but performed worse when made to focus. Those with habitual low use of multiple media were less able to filter out interference from distracting tasks, but were best able to focus on single tasks.

So some people are better at multitasking: specifically, those that naturally multitask better, do better when multitasking. Those that don’t, don’t. And it’s likely to assume that teens — and probably everyone — knows which sort of brain — or skills — they have.

This has broad applicability in the workplace, as well. Some people will naturally multitask, and restrictions that force them to focus exclusively on one thing — for example, to just work on a single task of a single project without reading twitter or chatting with coworkers — will actually decrease their productivity. Like most traits, multitasking appears to be distributed on a bell curve, with most people having average capability, but some people — out at three sigma from the norm — can be orders of magnitude better. And given the plasticity of the human mind, we can probably become better at multitasking through exposure or training.

Note that this lines up with research on ‘supertaskers’ (see Interruptions decrease individual performance, but not group performance), people who can do two or more things at once without decreased performance in any of them.

So when you read yet another article or see another TV spot declaiming that multitasking is impossible, or that it makes us stupid, remember that two high school kids proved them wrong.