What is it about?
This research showed that interruptions primarily affect performance on upcoming predictable events. Interruptions did not have as much of an effect when the upcoming situation was unpredictable.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
This points to different cognitive processes in managing predictable (or not) events. When events are unpredictable, people must reconstruct the event response from fundamentals. This process is not affected by task resumption lags, as this is actually cognitively a new task. This challenges ideas of interrupted work, particularly in safety critical contexts where unpredictable events can happen (think health care, process control, finance). People will handle a surprising event similarly, whether interrupted or not. So some good news. However, interruption models may not be considering the cognitive work of people adequately in their predictions.
Perspectives
This is the post-doctoral work of Dr. Dev Minotra. This was such an interesting finding and ties into some of our other work on how people handle unpredictable events/CWA/etc.
Dr Catherine M Burns
University of Waterloo
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Does Predictability Play a Role in Task Management? An Experimental Study With a Financial Trading Simulation, IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems, December 2018, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE),
DOI: 10.1109/thms.2018.2860595.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
