Task Interruption: Resumption Lag and the Role of Cues

Abstract

The consequences of interrupting someone in the middle of a complex task are of considerable practical and theoretical interest. The authors examine one behavioral measure of the disruption caused by task interruption, namely the "resumption lag," or the time needed to "collect one's thoughts" and restart a task after an interruption is over. The resumption lag (in this task environment) was double the interval between uninterrupted actions (3.8 seconds vs. 1.9 seconds), indicating a substantial disruptive effect. To probe the nature of the disruption, they examined the role of external cues associated with the interrupted task and found that cues available immediately before an interruption facilitate performance immediately afterwards, thus reducing the resumption lag. This "cue-availability" effect suggests that people deploy preparatory perceptual and memory processes, apparently spontaneously, to mitigate the disruptive effects of task interruption.