WOMEN SPECIAL.... Men cannot multitask

Men cannot multitask





It's not a myth or a stereotype. Scientific data backs up the age-old claim that men find it harder to switch between tasks when compared to women

Are women really better at multitasking? A study has said a tricky brain-teaser throws off men's walking gait but leaves most women unfazed, reopening an age-old debate about mental gender differences.

On a treadmill, men -and women over 60 -started swinging their right arm less while grappling with a complicated language test, researchers found. Language function and right arm swing are both thought to be controlled mainly by the brain's left hemisphere.

“Women under 60 seemed to be resistant to this effect, as they were able to perform the verbal task with no change in arm swing,“ said study co-author Tim Killeen, a neuroscientist from the University Hospital Balgrist in Switzerland. “In men and older women, the verbal task appears to overwhelm the left brain to the extent that the movement of the arm on the right is reduced.“

The “unexpected“ findings were published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. “We were surprised to find such a consistent gender difference in how two relatively simple behaviours--cognitive control and arm swing--interact with one another,“ Killeen said.

The team had set out to study how people walk under different conditions, aiming to build a database of “normal“ gait profiles for treating people with walking disorders. They used infrared cameras to record the treadmill walking patterns of 83 healthy people, aged 18 to 80.

The participants were asked to walk--first normally, and then while performing a verbal task called the Stroop test. Developed in the 1930s, the test involves printing the name of a colour--such as “red“, “green“ or “blue“--in a non-matching colour, then asking a person to say the colour of the ink, not the word itself.

Better at language?

This is difficult, explained Killeen, as the human brain “sees“ both the written word and the colour of the ink, and must reconcile the two.

During walking, the left and right arms swung approximately equally.“When we added the verbal task, we observed that in men of all ages and women over 60, this symmetry broke down, with a reduction in right arm swing while the left arm carried on swinging normally,“ said Killeen. Does this prove women are better multitaskers? “Ha ha! I think this shows that younger women may be able to resist interference of these two fairly specific behaviours,“ she said. Whether this might apply to other compound activities--such as driving and talking or walking and texting--has yet to be shown.

It is also unclear whether a woman's ability to take the verbal brain teaser in her stride confers any advantage over men, said Killeen.

The fact that women over 60 lose the capacity may provide a clue as to its origin, the researchers said.

Brain receptors of the female hormone oestrogen may get a bigger boost in younger women, who have more of it. “Alternatively, women are often shown to have somewhat better verbal skills than men“ and may find the Stroop test easier, Killeen said by email.

PHYS.ORG