Multitasking: The effects of pause as a task interruption

Salvucci and Bogunovich (2010) described a multitasking experiment in which users had to look up information on the internet as a primary task while being occasionally interrupted by a secondary chat task. This experiment showed that users who experience deferrable interruptions at times of higher mental workload tend to defer processing until times of lower workload. Based on this we conducted an experiment in which we investigated if we could influence the process of deferring incoming interruptions, and what the potential interruption effects are on effciency in the primary task. In our experiment we introduced a short pause at certain points of higher mental workload. Analysis showed that users switched more often to the secondary task at points of higher mental workload when they experienced a pause in the primary task, while effciency remained relatively unchanged. The results suggest that while having a tendency to monotask, users can be seduced into multitasking without losing effciency.