Managing the Disruptiveness of Interruptions
Abstract
Task interruptions are pervasive in shipboard and other task environments of interest to the Navy. This report summarizes three years of experimental work examining the cognitive processes involved in the warning interval immediately prior to an interruption (in the moments between an alert, like the phone ringing, and the interruption proper, like the conversation with the caller), and immediately after an interruption, when the operator has to resume the interrupted task. Behavioral evidence suggests that people prepare before an interruption to resume afterwards, but that even with such preparation, resuming the interrupted task takes several seconds, net of baseline performance, and produces confusion in terms of reconstructing mental state associated with the interrupted task. Interventions to reduce the time cost of resumption have not been particularly successful, suggesting that interruptions are associated with fixed cognitive costs. Work continues on a separate grant to test this hypothesis with modeling and empirical methods.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 09, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA444433
Entities
People
- Erik M. Altmann
Organizations
- Michigan State University