Interrupting an e-mail search: Influence of the complexity and the timing of the interruption

Scris de Paul Brazzolotto, George A. Michael on . Postat în Volume XXIII, Nr 2

Authors

Paul Brazzolotto*, George A. Michael

Department of Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science & Neuropsychology, Laboratoire d'Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs, EA 3082, Université Lumière Lyon 2, Université Lyon, F-69000 Lyon, France

Abstract

In everyday life, we must deal with recurring interruptions. The goal of this study is to investigate how detrimental interruptions can be and what factors can modulate their effects. We focused on the effects of the timing of interruptions, for which literature is anything but consistent, and the complexity of the interrupting task, which is well documented, but the explanation of its effect does not reach consensus. Moreover, these two factors may interact since they seemingly influence the same components of the resumption of the primary task after interruptions. We designed a primary e-mail search task during which the participants were or were not interrupted by an updating task. It was either simple or complex and came after either one (one found target e-mail) or nine actions of the primary task. The results showed that when there was no interruption, the Inter-Click Interval (ICI) was longer for one than for nine actions. When the interrupting task was simple, the time to resume the primary task (i.e., the Resumption Lag) was shorter after nine actions than after one, and there was no difference for complex interrupting tasks. The interaction effect between the complexity and the timing of interruptions shows that the goals of the primary and interrupting tasks compete and influence the resumption of the primary task.

Keywords: interruption, complexity, timing, inbox, automation

PAGES:135-153

doi:10.24193/cbb.2019.23.08

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