Exploring How Cognitive Differences Impact Behavior and Performance in The Face of IT Interruptions

While IT interruptions have improved users’ performance in the workplace and everyday life by providing them with timely information, numerous studies have reported their negative effects on users’ performance and behavior. In an attempt to understand how users’ cognitive capabilities affect their performance and behavior in the face of IT interruptions, we propose that the three main executive capabilities of users’ brains (Inhibition, Updating, Shifting) predict distinct performance and behavioral outcomes. The Inhibition capability predicts the likelihood that users get distracted by irrelevant IT interruptions while it improves their performance on the main task. Updating and Shifting capabilities positively impact users’ performance on both the interrupting and the main tasks. An experiment is designed where users are observed while performing a primary task while being interrupted by two types of IT interruptions (relevant versus irrelevant). Potential contributions are discussed