Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

More Harm Than Good? How Messages That Interrupt Can Make Us Vulnerable, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Bonnie Brinton Anderson, Anthony Vance, C. Brock Kirwan, David Eargle

Faculty Publications

System-generated alerts are ubiquitous in personal computing and, with the proliferation of mobile devices, daily activity. While these interruptions provide timely information, research shows they come at a high cost in terms of increased stress and decreased productivity. This is due to dual-task interference (DTI), a cognitive limitation in which even simple tasks cannot be simultaneously performed without significant performance loss. Although previous research has examined how DTI impacts the performance of a primary task (the task that was interrupted), no research has examined the effect of DTI on the interrupting task. This is an important gap because in many …