Abstract
Prior research has shown that interruptions lead to a variety of performance costs. However, these costs are heterogenous and poorly understood. Under some circumstances, interruptions lead to large decreases in accuracy on the primary task, whereas in others task duration increases, but task accuracy is unaffected. Presently, the underlying cause of these costs is unclear. The Memory for Goals model suggests that interruptions interfere with the ability to represent the current goal of the primary task. Here, we test the idea that working memory (WM) may play a critical role in representing the current goal and thus may underlie the observed costs associated with interruption. In two experiments, we utilized laboratory-based visual search tasks, which differed in their WM demands, in order to assess how this difference influenced the observed interruption costs. Interruptions led to more severe performance costs when the target of the search changed on each trial. When the search target was consistent across trials, the cost of interruption was greatly reduced. This suggests that the WM demands associated with the primary task play an important role in determining the performance costs of interruption. Our findings suggest that it is important for research to consider the cognitive processes a task engages in order to predict the nature of the adverse effects of interruption in applied settings such as radiology.
Highlights
Recall a moment when your conversation with a friend was interrupted
When the target is the same through the course of an experiment and the memory demands on target representation are relatively low, such as in the Williams and Drew study and our Experiment 2, we argue that this visual search task does not place as high demand on working memory (WM) as sequential tasks such as UNRAVEL
We demonstrate that the type of task people complete is crucial for determining the level to which performance is disrupted by interruptions
Summary
Recall a moment when your conversation with a friend was interrupted. There may have been difficulty remembering the topic of the conversation. Imagine being interrupted during a moment when there are life and death consequences, for example: radiologists who search through medical images for cancer or TSA agents who screen baggage for potentially harmful objects. An interruption may be Alonso et al Cogn. Research (2021) 6:58 more than just a nuisance. Our current research aims to determine whether interruption leads to decrements in performance during visual search and the circumstances that exacerbate these performance decrements. Our focus on visual search is motivated by the possibility that we can identify factors that hinder radiologists’ ability to search through medical images and diagnose disease
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