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

Abstract

Summary: We conducted three experiments to examine the dynamics of a delayed-execute prospective memory task involving task interruptions. In the delayed-execute paradigm, participants must delay a response until some future condition is met. After an intention was formed to a salient cue, an interruption reduced prospective memory relative to a no-interruption condition. Prospective memory for cues encountered during an interrupting task was worse than for cues occurring before an interruption, but the location of the cue in either the ongoing task or the interruption did not affect prospective memory. Importantly, reinstating the prevailing context after the interruption alleviated the negative influence of the interruption. Providing participants with information about the future context for making the delayed-execute response also alleviated some of these deficits presumably because participants could encode more specific features of the performance context. These results highlight the potential importance of contextual associations and reminders in completing everyday intentions successfully.

Traditions of research into interruptions in healthcare: A conceptual review

“…Some of these papers refer to the actual or potential application of the findings to healthcare [130][131][132][133][134][135][136]. Other papers provide excellent reviews of the impact of interruptions on performance from a cognitive psychology perspective [5,16,137,138], again referring to potential applications in healthcare.…”

“…A universal feature of the papers in the applied cognitive psychology tradition is that they use cognitive theory to guide discussions of when and how interruptions might influence performance [5,16,[130][131][132][133][134][135][136][137][138]. Therefore they all focus on cognition as a process internal to the individual person prospective memory [5,136,137].…”

“…Therefore they all focus on cognition as a process internal to the individual person prospective memory [5,136,137]. The empirical work reported is almost always a highly controllable laboratory task chosen more for its ability to test theory than its ability to represent a particular domain of application.…”

“…A further feature of the papers in this tradition is their exclusive focus on interruptions as potentially negative: the focus is on how interruptions disrupt cognitive processes rather than the role that the content of an interruption might play in a work context [5,16,[130][131][132][133][134][135][136][137][138]. Following on from this, all the papers focus on the interruption dyad of interrupter and interruptee, rather than taking a broader systems perspective on the purpose of interruptions.…”

“…Following on from this, all the papers focus on the interruption dyad of interrupter and interruptee, rather than taking a broader systems perspective on the purpose of interruptions. Interventions suggested usually focus on measures that might protect the individual's cognitive processes from the disruptive effects of interruptions [5,16,130,[132][133][134][135][136][137][138]. In summary, applied cognitive psychology brings to interruptions research a focus on studying the individual clinician's mental processes with well-controlled experiments, and on identifying factors that might disturb those processes and lead to error.…”