Working mothers may have to juggle more tasks than their husbands, but
the long-held belief that women are better than men at multitasking is a myth,
according to new Swedish research. "On the contrary, the results of our
study show that men are better at multitasking than women," Timo
Maentylae, a psychology professor at Stockholm University, said. Men are
sometimes better than women at handling multiple tasks simultaneously, but the
performance gap is correlated to the female menstrual cycle, according to his
study, to be published in US peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science.
In line with previous research, men and women with good so-called
working memory were also better than others at multitasking. However, Maentylae
found that the ability to combine several different tasks at once was also
linked to spatial ability, which, for women, is linked to their menstrual
phase. "Previous studies have shown that women's spatial skills vary
across the menstrual cycle with high capacity around menstruation and much
lower around ovulation, when oestrogen levels are high," he said. "The
results showed a clear difference in multitasking between men and women in the
ovulation phase, while this effect was eliminated for women in the menstrual
phase."
The participants, 160 men and women between 20 and 43 years of age, were
instructed to keep track of three digital "clocks", or counters, that
displayed different times at different speeds. While registering certain times
displayed by the clocks, defined by a simple set of rules, they also had to
watch a scrolling ticker featuring common Swedish names, pressing the mouse
button when one of the names was repeated. Differences in spatial ability and
working memory were based on separate tests.
France24
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