What makes Real-World Interruptions Disruptive? Evidence from an Office Setting

Abstract

With the constant barrage of cell phone calls, emails, instant messages, calendar reminders, and more, interruptions have become a common and consistent occurrence in our daily lives. The majority of the literature on interruptions to date has been based on controlled laboratory experiments and it is not yet completely clear how these results will translate into naturalistic settings and/or if there are certain features of interruptions and resumption that are not observable in the controlled setting. The current study is an exploratory study of how interruptions manifest in the naturalistic environment. We found that when working on computer-based tasks in real-world environments, external interruptions are more disruptive than internal interruptions. However, no reliable difference was shown in resumption time when resuming from multiple interruptions as opposed to single interruptions, and when resuming a different task as opposed to resuming the same task that was interrupted.

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

“…The duration of interruption is an important factor that influences resuming processes in terms of both speed and error generation (Altmann & Trafton, 2007). For instance, Hodgetts and Jones (2006) showed interruption duration effects in the Tower of London task but only when using interruptions as short as 3 s. However, these effects were not always confirmed (Cades, Werner, Boehm-Davis, & Arshad, 2010;Einstein, McDaniel, Williford, Pagan, & Dismukes, 2003;Gillie & Broadbent, 1989;Li et al, 2006;Monk et al, 2008). What could explain such discrepancies?…”

“…It has been shown that interruptions that were similar to the primary task in terms of both modality and task schemata were more impactful than dissimilar ones (Czerwinski et al, 1991). Yet these results do not seem always replicable (Cades et al, 2010;Eyrolle & Cellier, 2000). Lu et al (2013) compiled three meta-analyses to explore the similarity effects using the modality of the tasks.…”

Activation and inhibition of posterior parietal cortex have bi-directional effects on spatial errors following interruptions

“…Interruptions to our ongoing mental activities are omnipresent in modern life—whether from cell phones, emails, navigation devices, alarms, etc. An observational study found that people are interrupted an average of 12 times per hour at work in our increasingly digital world (Cades et al, 2010 ), with such interruptions often leading to errors. Another study of nurses from two hospitals showed that interruptions increased both procedural (e.g., fail to check patient identification) and clinical judgment errors (e.g., give the wrong drug or wrong dose), with potentially life threatening consequences (Westbrook et al, 2010 ).…”

Reducing the Disruptive Effects of Interruptions With Noninvasive Brain Stimulation

“…As the number of technological devices that people interact with on a daily basis has increased-cell phones, laptops, navigation devices, etc.-so has the incidence of interruptions to ongoing work activities. Recent data has put the frequency of interruptions to as much as 12 times per hour in the workplace (Cades, Werner, Boehm-Davis, & Arshad, 2010), with an estimated productivity cost to companies in the United States of $588 billion per year (Spira & Feintuch, 2005).…”