Media multitasking is associated with distractibility and increased prefrontal activity in adolescents and young adults Moisala, M.; Salmela, V.; Hietajärvi, L.; Salo, E.; Carlson, S.; Salonen, O.; Lonka, K.; Hakkarainen, K.; Salmela-Aro, Katariina; Alho, K.Moisala, M., Salmela, V., Hietajärvi, L., Salo, E., Carlson, S., Salonen, O., . . . Alho, K. (2016). Media multitasking is associated with distractibility and increased prefrontal activity in adolescents and young adults. NeuroImage, 134, 113-121. doi:10.1016NeuroImage, 134, 113-121. doi:10. /j.neuroimage.2016 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. A C C E P T E D M A N U S C R I P T ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Conflict of interest statement:The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.Keywords: media multitasking, attention, prefrontal cortex, fMRI A C C E P T E D M A N U S C R I P T ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTPage 2

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Top-down controlled selective or divided attention to sounds and visual objects, as well as bottom-up triggered attention to auditory and visual distractors, has been widely investigated. However, no study has systematically compared brain activations related to all these types of attention. To this end, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity in participants performing a tone pitch or a foveal grating orientation discrimination task, or both, distracted by novel sounds not sharing frequencies with the tones or by extrafoveal visual textures. To force focusing of attention to tones or gratings, or both, task difficulty was kept constantly high with an adaptive staircase method. A whole brain analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed fronto-parietal attention networks for both selective auditory and visual attention. A subsequent conjunction analysis indicated partial overlaps of these networks. However, like some previous studies, the present results also suggest segregation of prefrontal areas involved in the control of auditory and visual attention. The ANOVA also suggested, and another conjunction analysis confirmed, an additional activity enhancement in the left middle frontal gyrus related to divided attention supporting the role of this area in top-down integration of dual task performance. Distractors expectedly disrupted task performance. However, contrary to our expectations, activations specifically related to the distractors were found only in the auditory and visual cortices. This suggests gating of the distractors from further processing perhaps due to strictly focused attention in the current demanding discrimination tasks.