Abstract

Recent research has found that forced interruptions at points of higher mental workload are more disruptive than at points of lower workload. This paper investigates a complementary idea: when users experience deferrable interruptions at points of higher workload, they may tend to defer processing of the interruption until times of lower workload. In an experiment, users performed a mail-browser primary task while being occasionally interrupted by a secondary chat task, evenly distributed between points of higher and lower workload. Analysis showed that 94 % of the time, users switched to the interrupting task during periods of lower workload, versus only 6 % during periods of higher workload. The results suggest that when interruptions can be deferred, users have a strong tendency to “monotask ” until primary-task mental workload has been minimized. Author Keywords Multitasking, interruption, attention, problem state, chat,

Citations