Good catch there Donal!  In my book, pick and choose becomes pick, poke and hope because most times you're not that sure if the direction you take is where you want to go.

As for multi-tasking, I'm surprised Nass failed to consider multiple tasks with similar attributes...one's where your thinking processes are in tune with each task in progress. I've found I'm able to juggle multiple tasks if and only if there are rudimentary rules for each task overlapping the others. That way when I switch from one to another, a quick look is all I need to bring back short-term memory of what I wanted to accomplish and where I left off. On the other hand, tasks with dissimilar rudimentary tasks that have nothing in common with one another are nearly impossible to make a smooth transition too unless I wrote myself a note what I was expecting to accomplish and where I left it.

It's all about aligning your thought processes...similar taskings draw from the same or similar mental resources which makes recalling short-term memory as easy as breathing...something you do unconsciously without thinking. Whereas, dissimilar taskings are drawing from a wider variety of disassociated mental resources which one can accidentally draw the wrong mental data bit which throws the task results off and you become perplexed, not realizing the mental error you made is skewing the task progress.

Let me also add, one time I tried to used an egg timer to alert me when a specific task was finished processing data. When it dinged, all short-term memory flooded back and I knew exactly where I left the task and what I was expecting...like clockwork. However, the ding also washed the task I was working on at the time too...I had no memory where I left off, what I was doing or what I was expecting. The next time when the ding occurred, I tried to commit the task at hand to short-term memory and that make things even worst. It was like having two vats of liquid, one blue, the other yellow, flowing into a pipe with the only rule being one color liquid or the other. The ding meant I was suppose to switch one petcock off and the other on simultaneously. When I tried to commit the current task to memory with the other flooding back, it was like both petcocks where open at the same time so the liquids mixed and the resultant liquid in the pipe was green. In real time, both tasks had attributes of each mixed with the other so I had to regroup and start each one over.

Reading the whole original interview, I don't see any evidence that they have established a causal relationship between heightened multitasking behavior and loss of these cognitive abilities like relevance discrimination and task-shifting, etc. All they have is a correlation: i.e. kids who aren't concentrating are ... poor at concentrating.

Actually, in the interview Nass admits as much, after talking about all the 'evidence' he has amassed. He then says that he ... hasn't started investigating the causal issue:

Explain to me the fMRI that you're going to be doing.

This is probably better explained by Anthony Wagner, [researcher at the Stanford Memory Laboratory and associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Program]. But basically the ideas are, our brain is divided into pieces, with different pieces doing different things. So the question is, when I confront you with something, what parts of your brain does your brain decide to use?

So, for example, if I present you with a lot of potentially irrelevant information, some people go for it, just say, "Oh, more, more, more, more, more!" Others say: "No, I'd like to work with what I've got. That's what I want to focus on." That would be indicated by different parts of the brain lighting up or not, and that's what we're trying to see.

So what are the potential outcomes of what you're doing later today?

The potential outcome of the fMRI is to start to ask the question, is it nurture or nature? Are people born multitaskers, or are they made multitaskers?

So until we get some data on how behavior affects cognitive abillity over time, we basically know ... nothing. All that we really know at this point is that people who are easily distracted are poor at various forms of information processing. We don't know if (i) there are more of them than there used to be, nor (ii) what makes them poor at these things.

It may well be that the proliferation of distractions in the digital age is making the kids stupid. There are lots of possible hypotheses here. My rough guess from teaching is that smart kids - those who are good and quick at sorting, processing, switching information sources and tasks - are getting much more efficient as they hone their skills through constant disciplined multitasking. And stupid kids have a whole new set of temptations to pull them away from the task at hand and thereby diminishing their ability to focus over time.