Not Now! Supporting Interruption Management by Indicating the Modality and Urgency of Pending Tasks

Abstract

Operators in complex event-driven domains must coordinate competing attentional demands in the form of multiple tasks and interactions. This study examined the extent to which this requirement can be supported more effectively through informative interruption cueing (in this case, partial information about the nature of pending tasks). The 48 participants performed a visually demanding air traffic control (ATC) task. They were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 experimental groups that differed in the availability of information (not available, available upon request, available automatically) about the urgency and modality of pending interruption tasks. Within-subject variables included ATC-related workload and the modality, frequency, and priority of interruption tasks. The results show that advance knowledge about the nature of pending tasks led participants to delay visual interruption tasks the longest, which allowed them to avoid intramodal interference and scanning costs associated with performing these tasks concurrently with ATC tasks. The 3 experimental groups did not differ significantly in terms of their interruption task performance; however, the group that automatically received task-related information showed better ATC performance, thus experiencing a net performance gain. Actual or potential applications of this research include the design of interfaces in support of attention and interruption management in a wide range of event-driven environments.

Attention: Theory, Principles, Models and Applications

“…There are beginning to be developed design-oriented solutions that can (a) use automation to monitor the progress of certain types of manual work to assess more appropriate times to interrupt (Bailey & Konstan, 2006;Dorneich et al, 2012); (b) provide advanced notification of the importance of the interruption so that the operator can decide whether or not to fully abandon the ongoing task or postpone a switch to the interruption task (Ho et al, 2004); (c) provide visual placeholders, like a flashing cursor, that will support rapid reacquisition of an ongoing task after the switch (Trafton et al, 2005); (d) provide support tools, particularly for situation awareness maintenance during interruptions, such as that described by St. John and Smallman (2008) and (e) provide techniques for breaking through the attentional tunnel if automation infers that this is taking place (St Lot et al, 2020) A computational model incorporating some of these effects was developed by Wickens, Gutzwiller et al (2015), and is called STOM (strategic task overload management); the "overload" term deriving from the fact that it is primarily in these times when workload imposed by multi-tasking demands is "over the red line" and concurrent performance impossible that task switching and task shedding strategies are invoked.…”

Multitasking with Alexa

“…Multiple resources theory holds that concurrent tasks are more disruptive to one another when they have higher overlap across these dimensions. This has been demonstrated experimentally as auditory interruptions are less disruptive than visual interruptions to visual primary tasks [29,44]. Similar cognitive resources to those used in writing new content (e.g.…”

Welcome OnBoard

“…This person coordinates the whole nurse team and is a reference in the surgical suite for any question of organization. However, Popovici et al [33] relate the key issues of effective communication among hospital stakeholders, including interruption problems and unintuitive user interface -problem also discussed in civil aviation [20]. Indeed, the mobility of information and the relationship between information and representation [3,4] are valuable but rarely served by technology within the hospital.…”

“…Though it is not the focus of the paper, we also designed and developed a mobile phone application to enable the staff to pick information about cases from OnBoard when connecting with the phone and carry it within the hospital. The MyBoard app was designed according to interruptions management guidelines [20]. However, we did not deploy it for security and privacy reasons.…”