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1. Introduction
The pervasive digital media and ubiquitous access to the Internet enable people to engage with multiple media offerings simultaneously and effortlessly. The on-demand digital media, which can be distributed and consumed in a convenient and flexible manner, results in the growing popularity of media multitasking (Carrier et al., 2009; Rideout et al., 2010; Wang and Tchernev, 2012). Media multitaskers engage with multiple media concurrently (Roberts and Foehr, 2008) and switch attention across different tasks during media use (Jeong and Fishbein, 2007). Depending on media affordances of different devices, media multitasking could occur either across multiple types of media (e.g. newspaper, TV, computer and book) or within a single type of media.
Over the last decade, smartphones have penetrated our daily lives due to their diverse and convenient functions that cater to our social, entertainment and professional demands (Chan, 2018; Jiang et al., 2018; Chen et al., 2019). Smartphones are widely used for a variety of daily activities, such as social communication, shopping, business, entertainment, traveling and health management (Chan, 2018; Chen et al., 2019; Tao et al., 2020). Statistics shows that there are currently three billion smartphone users worldwide (Newzoo, 2019). In China, there are 8.90 million smartphone users in 2020; about 63% of the total population, and they on average spend five hours daily on their smartphones (CNNIC, 2020).
With the rise of mobile media technology, the wide use of smartphone catalyzes multitasking by encapsulating various types of media consumption in a single device (i.e. a smartphone) (Shin et al., 2016). One pervasive phenomenon related to smartphone use is smartphone multitasking (Grinols and Rajesh, 2014; Lim and Shim, 2016). Generally, smartphone multitasking refers to using multiple smartphone applications concurrently or using smartphone applications while performing other intended information processing activities (e.g. reading and talking) (Foehr, 2006; Jeong and Fishbein, 2007; Grinols and Rajesh, 2014; Lim and Shim, 2016). While smartphone multitasking has become one of the most popular types of media multitasking in recent years, it has not received much research attention.
In contrast to traditional media multitasking (e.g. transferring among multiple types of media), smartphones afford unique features that enable distinctive multitasking patterns. First, the unique communicative affordances (such as portability, availability, locatability, and...