Study: Distractions Impede Learning

"Your parents were right, don't study with the TV on. Multitasking may be a necessity in today's fast-paced world, but new research shows distractions affect the way people learn, making the knowledge they gain harder to use later on.

The study, in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also provides a clue as to why it happens.

'What's new is that even if you can learn while distracted, it changes how you learn to make it less efficient and useful,' said Russell A. Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

That could affect a lot of young people. A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation last year found third-graders through 12th-graders devoted, on average, nearly 6 1/2 hours per day to TV and videos, music, video games and computers."