Interactive posters: THE EFFECTS OF WARNINGS AND DISPLAY SIMILARITY ON INTERRUPTION IN MULTITASKING ENVIRONMENTS

Operators are often required to perform concurrent tasks, as well as attend to additional information (e.g., emergencies, changes of plans). This additional information has a tendency to interrupt the human operator's primary duties, requiring the operator to delay completion of these duties until a later time. Two experiments examined the effects of display similarity and the presence or absence of a warning on an operator's ability to remember information from (and hence, resume) multiple primary tasks. It was hypothesized that subjects' performance would be worse when interrupted by a task that was more similar to the primary task. It was also hypothesized that subjects would benefit from a warning prior to the interruption. In experiment 1, subjects monitored information from 4 different space station systems. After 4 minutes, an interrupting task replaced the information on the computer screen. Subjects were either warned or not warned of the upcoming interruption 30 seconds prior to its onset. The interruption task was either similar or dissimilar in display format to the primary task.