Window of Opportunity: Using the Interruption Lag to Manage Disruption in Complex Tasks

Abstract

Interruption is a fundamental human problem. Past research has focused on how people resume an interrupted task after attending to some unrelated secondary task, ignoring interruptions that are an integral part of overall performance. In many settings, such as air traffic control or in-vehicle navigation, people must integrate the processing of the interruption itself and the resumption of the interrupted task. An experiment was conducted to investigate how people manage interruptions in a team decision-making task where interruptions are an integral part of overall performance. One strategy proposed for managing interruptions is the “rehearsal strategy.” It was expected that people who rehearsed where they would resume the task would be able to overcome the disruption imposed by interruption. The results indicate that people instructed to use this strategy behaved differently than those who were not instructed. However, instruction did not improve performance on interrupted tasks and may even have been detrimental.