Timecourse of Recovery from Task Interruption: Data and a Model

Abstract

Interruption of a complex cognitive task can entail, for the "interruptee," a sense of having to recover afterward. The authors examined this recovery process by measuring the time-course of responses following an interruption. They sampled over 13,000 interruptions to obtain stable data. Results show that response times dropped in a smooth curvilinear pattern for the first 10 responses (15 sec or so) of postinterruption performance. They explain this pattern in terms of the cognitive system retrieving a displaced mental context from memory incrementally, with each retrieved element adding to the set of primes facilitating the next retrieval. The model explains a learning effect in the data in which the time-course of recovery changes over blocks, and is generally consistent with current representational theories of expertise.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2007
Accession Number
ADA480577

Entities

People

  • Erik M. Altmann
  • J. G. Trafton

Organizations

  • Michigan State University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Cognitive Science
  • Cognitive Workload
  • Computers
  • Content Addressable Memory
  • Data Sets
  • Electronic Mail
  • Environment
  • Human Factors Engineering
  • Information Operations
  • Intervals
  • Military Research
  • New York
  • Perception
  • Psychology
  • Recovery
  • Situational Awareness
  • Task Performance And Analysis

Fields of Study

  • Psychology

Readers

  • Brain and Cognitive Science; Experimental Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Systems Analysis and Design