Improving memory after interruption: Exploiting soft constraints and manipulating information access cost.

Abstract

Forgetting what one was doing prior to interruption is an everyday problem. The recent soft constraints hypothesis (Gray, Sims, Fu, & Schoelles, 2006) emphasizes the strategic adaptation of information processing strategy to the task environment. It predicts that increasing information access cost (IAC: the time, and physical and mental effort involved in accessing information) encourages a more memoryintensive strategy. Like interruptions, access costs are also intrinsic to most work environments, such as when opening documents and e-mails. Three experiments investigated whether increasing IAC during a simple copying task can be an effective method for reducing forgetting following interruption. IAC was designated Low (all information permanently visible), Medium (a mouse movement to uncover target information), or High (an additional few seconds to uncover such information). Experiment 1 found that recall improved across all three levels of IAC. Subsequent experiments found that High IAC facilitated resumption after interruption, particularly when interruption occurred on half of all trials (Experiment 2), and improved prospective memory following two different interrupting tasks, even when one involved the disruptive effect of using the same type of resource as the primary task (Experiment 3). The improvement of memory after interruption with increased IAC supports the prediction of the soft constraints hypothesis. The main disadvantage of a high access cost was a reduction in speed of task completion. The practicality of manipulating IAC as a design method for inducing a memory-intensive strategy to protect against forgetting is discussed.

A framework for unpacking cognitive benefits of distributed complex visual displays.

“…If stacked display users experience relatively higher information access cost, they should try to overcome the cost by spending extra encoding time to facilitate later retrievals from memory (Morgan, Patrick, Waldron, King, & Patrick, 2009). As predicted, participants in the stacked display condition fixated significantly longer on information pieces on each page during their first visit to each page (called first-pass fixations) than those who solved the same problem using the distributed display.…”

The influence of training and experience on memory strategy

“…Studies of high access cost (e.g., Morgan et al, 2009, Experiment 1) reported large effect sizes (f = .76 -.97) on strategy measures. Statistical power for all four experiments was calculated using G*Power 3.1.7 software (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007;Faul, Erdfelder, Buchner, & Lang, 2009).…”

“…Inducing a more memory-based strategy by increased access cost can: (a) mitigate the negative effects of interruption by reducing forgetting post-interruption (e.g., Morgan et al, 2009); (b) encourage better use of an interruption lag, which is a short delay before an interrupting task that provides an opportunity to encode suspended goals for retrieval postinterruption ; and (c) also encourage better planning and solution efficiency in problem solving . The focus of the theory of soft constraints (Gray et al, 2006) is on the effect of constraints of the task environment on performance and is consistent with a wide-ranging literature suggesting that many aspects of behavior are controlled by short-term rather than long-term tradeoffs (e.g., Hernstein & Vaughn, 1980;Loewenstein, Read, & Baumeister, 2003).…”

“…If the cost of accessing information is perceived to be low then a lower memory-based strategy is adopted and the display is used more as an external memory resource (e.g., Fu & Gray, 2000;Gray et al, 2006;Morgan et al, 2009;. A shift to a more memorybased strategy can be induced by a relatively small access cost of a couple of seconds.…”

“…In the same tradition is the theory of soft constraints Gray, Simms, Fu, & Schoelles, 2006), which elaborates how the degree of memory-based strategy utilized to perform a task adapts to changes in the constraints of the task environment. Increasing the cost of accessing information within a task will induce a more memory-based strategy compared to when such information is available without such an access cost (Fu & Gray, 2000;Gray et al, 2006;Morgan, Patrick, Waldron, King, & Patrick, 2009;Morgan, Patrick, & Tiley, 2013). The theory of soft constraints acknowledges that training and/or top-down demands can overwrite the effect of the task environment on the degree of memory-based strategy that is selected (Gray et al, 2006), although to the best of our knowledge there is no empirical evidence bearing on this theoretically important issue.…”