What's Lagging in our Understanding of Interruptions?: Effects of Interruption Lags in Sequential Decision-Making

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Jennifer Sloane, Christopher Donkin, Ben R. Newell, Garston Liang

Published: 2019, Last Modified: 12 Feb 2026CogSci 2019EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Author(s): Sloane, Jennifer; Donkin, Chris; Newell, Ben; Liang, Garston | Abstract: Interruptions are an inevitable part of every day life. Previousresearch suggests that interruptions can decrease performanceand increase errors and response time. Additionally, there isevidence that providing a lag time prior to an interruption canmitigate some of the interruption costs. The goal of this pa-per is to investigate the effects of interruptions and interrup-tion lags and explore possible strategies to attenuate interrup-tion costs. A novel sequential decision-making paradigm wasused, where the difficulty of the task and type of interruptionwere the two experimental manipulations. The results indicatethat there is a potential benefit to including a lag time whenpresented with interruptions.