For a nineties kid, when it came to means of media consumption, there was only T.V., VHS, a few gaming consoles and eventually DVD. The kids of today have umpteen times a number of options.

There’s probably some 12-year-old out there right now… listening to music while watching T.V. while texting his friend while uploading an Instagram picture and sharing it on Facebook and Twitter… When does the madness end?! The answer is… it doesn’t.

And it’s just that: madness. Media multitasking madness. When I say media multitasking, I mean using multiple forms of media at once. Ever have the T.V. on in the background while you’re sending a text? Congratulations, you’ve media multitasked.

So in our increasingly media-consumptive society, one would assume that our ability to juggle multiple forms of media at once would naturally increase. (Not for everyone. If I’m writing a text message, the rest of my surroundings essentially disappear and I practically go deaf until I’m finished writing it. To be fair, multitasking in general was never quite a strong point of mine.)

But we might especially assume that the youth of today is becoming especially adept at tweeting whilst snapping and chatting... Amy S. Finn of the University of Toronto, studied the influence of media multitasking among adolescents in relation to performance at school to find out if that’s true.

The results pose the possibility that that teenagers who are frequently media multitasking are actually performing worse than students who are not.

The study, which administered a Media Use Questionnaire to 73 Boston-area eighth grade students, “found a link between greater media multitasking and worse academic outcomes in adolescents. This relationship may be due to decreased executive functions and increased impulsiveness—both previously associated with both greater media multitasking and worse academic outcomes,” Finn said.

For now, Finn says, it’s a casual link. It’s almost a chicken or the egg situation. The study doesn’t tell whether media multitasking is the cause of the poorer functions or if media multitasking is a result of cognitive differences.

A 2014 study performed by a group of Oregon high school seniors (who are now, no doubt, halfway to being amazing scholars) argues that people are multitasking at high rates and are possibly becoming very good at it.

Sarayu Caulfield and Alexandra Ulmer, who lead the study “Capacity Limits of Working Memory: The Impact of Media Multitasking on Cognitive Control in the Adolescent Mind,” recruited 196 females and 207 males between the ages 10 and 19 and interviewed them on their media habits and had them complete the Stanford Multitasking Media Index. Then, they were assigned various tasks that assessed their ability to swap between tasks and to focus on a single task.

It turns out that the high media multitaskers were able to filter out distractions well but yielded poorer results when required to place their focus on a single task. Those who weren’t multitasking as frequently were just the opposite: better at focusing on single tasks and not as capable of filtering out distractions.

Ulmer suggests that the study could significantly affect teaching styles in the future.

“This study suggests that digital natives with high multiple media use may have developed an enhanced working memory and perform better in distracting environments than when focused on a single task with no distractions,” Ulmer said.

While this may be true, it may only be true for these “digital natives.”

A University of Utah study conducted in 2013 indicated that the most frequent multitaskers (who believe they are multitasking efficiently) are the least likely to do so.

The study measured the multitasking ability of 310 undergraduate psychology students via tests and questionnaires, and the results were quite alarming.

A senior author of the study, University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer says “the people who are most likely to multitask harbor the illusion that they are better than average at it when in fact they are no better than average and often worse.”

The interesting relationship between this study and the previous two, is that it was conducted on an older group (not to mention it was done 3 years ago, or about 6 iPhones ago) who aren’t “digital natives.”

Would the results be different for those who spent more time in their youth media multitasking? We’ll have to wait about 5 or so more years to find out for sure.