Resistance to the impact of interruptions during multitasking by healthy adults and dysexecutive patients

Abstract

Two experiments (one with healthy adult volunteers and the other with controls and dysexecutive patients) assessed the impact of interruptions on a novel test of multitasking.The test involved switching repeatedly between four tasks (block construction, bead threading, paper folding, alphabetical searching) over a 10 minute period. In Experiment 1, there were 4 groups of 20 healthy participants. One group attempted multitasking with no interruption, a second group was interrupted early in the test, a third group late in the test and a fourth group was interrupted both early and late. Interruption involved carrying out a fifth, unexpected task for a period of one minute before returning to the four main tasks. There was no difference in multitasking performance between the groups. In Experiment 2 the participants were seven dysexecutive patients and 14 age-matched controls. A repeated measures approach was employed to assess the impact of two interruptions (early and late) for both groups. Contrary to predictions, the patients as well as controls were resistant to the effects of interruptions, despite their clearly impaired multitasking performance. These results suggest that the ability to deal with interruptions may be separable from the ability to organise and execute multiple tasks within a limited time frame.

The Role of Interruptions and Contextual Associations in Delayed‐Execute Prospective Memory

“…Given the complexity of daily activities, we advocate investigating intentions in a variety of contexts, including when interrupted task are resumed automatically, resumed more effortfully, or are skipped. As Dodhia and Dismukes point out, because the environment may not typically return people to interrupted tasks (only 48% of participants did so after the interruption in their experiment, but see Law, Logie, Pearson, Moretti, and Dimarco () for higher return rates in a multitasking environment), understanding the differences between these conditions would be useful. They showed that providing either an explicit reminder at the beginning of the interruption, or a sufficient pause of 8 to 12 s after the interruption, were the best ways to increase the likelihood of returning to the task.…”

“…Although we focused on prospective memory accuracy in the present study, future research could examine how interruptions affect the speed of responding to trials during either the ongoing task or the intention. In a multitasking paradigm, Law et al () found that their interruptions produced timing costs on tasks rather than accuracy deficits (See also Speier, Valacich, & Vessey, ). Although we found profound negative effects of interruptions in terms of accuracy consistently in our experiments, interruptions that may not produce accuracy deficits might reveal response‐time deficits.…”

Failures Due to Interruptions or Distractions: A Review and a New Framework

“…Interruptions of ongoing activities have proved to be one of the hot topics in applied cognitive sciences, gathering researchers from a wide variety of specialties such as human-computer interaction (Bailey & Konstan, 2006;Roda & Thomas, 2006), cognitive psychology (Eyrolle & Cellier, 2000;Müller & Rabbitt, 1989), neuropsychology (Clapp & Gazzaley, 2012;Law et al, 2004), ergonomics (Ratwani, Andrews, Mccurry, Trafton, & Peterson, 2007; sometimes in dramatic consequences. Famous cases of air traffic accidents or medical tragedies (Eyrolle & Cellier, 2000) were directly linked to interruptionrelated errors.…”

Naturalistic assessment of executive function and everyday multitasking in healthy older adults

“…For laboratory testing, the term multitasking has been used to describe rapidly switching between tasks (e.g., Law et al, 2004) as well as to describe simultaneously performing multiple tasks (e.g., Neider et al, 2011). Considered in these ways, findings suggest an age-related decline in multitasking abilities (see also Craik & Bialystok, 2006; Garden, Phillips, & MacPherson, 2001; Levine et al, 1998; Lin, Chan, Zheng, Yang, and Wang, 2007).…”