What's Lagging in our Understanding of Interruptions?

Abstract

Interruptions are an inevitable part of every day life. Previous research suggests that interruptions can decrease performance and increase errors and response time. Additionally, there is evidence that providing a lag time prior to an interruption can mitigate some of the interruption costs. The goal of this paper is to investigate the effects of interruptions and interruption lags and explore possible strategies to attenuate interruption costs. A novel sequential decision-making paradigm was used, where the difficulty of the task and type of interruption were the two experimental manipulations. The results indicate that there is a potential benefit to including a lag time when presented with interruptions.