Modelling interruptions of human-in-the loop tasks

Interruptions are a part of our everyday experience and are increasingly becoming a part of our work. Systems are typically not designed with consideration of the effects of interrupting a user during a task sequence. Research is being done in the field of interruptions and its effects. There have been various claims about the effects of interruptions on human task performance. It has been shown that interruptions may not only increase the time to perform a task but also decrease the performance. It has also been analyzed that the effect of interruptions depends on many parameters including task complexity, point of interruption, interruption characteristics, and interruption type. The results from the experiments performed will strengthen the hypothesis that interrupting tasks will require more time to complete than performing the same task individually and that the performance of the interrupting task will depend on the difficulty level of primary task in terms of errors made. It will also help us show that the performance of the primary task will depend on cross-modality (visual and audio) conditions of interrupting task. In this experiment we used the multi resource theory as a basis for analyzing interruptions and its effects. The results from the experiment will also help test another hypothesis that the resumption lag (in seconds) will depend on cross-modality (visual and audio) conditions of interrupting task and will also depend on the difficulty level of the primary task --Abstract, page iv