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Literature Review Notes |
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- abstract: tower of London problems; retrieval of suspended goal facilitated when given opportunity to encode cues during an interruption lag; impeded when those visual cues were subsequently altered following interruption; context before and after interruption is critical to efficient interruption recovery;
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- introduction: success of goal retrieval may be dependent of processes of decay or interference in memory; there is lack of consensus as to what makes interruptions disruptive;
- ACT-R traditional goal-stack construct: goals may be subject to the same limitations as ordinary declarative memory elements; participants do not choose to engage in any costly preparatory processes at the point of goal suspension; activation decay may also be responsible for forgetting in goal memory; goals suspended for longer were found to be more time consuming to retrieve;
- [Altmann Trafton 02] associative activation; processes operating at goal suspension and resumption; activation of a goal in this model is dependent on not only the length of time since that goal was last sampled (base-level activation) but also environmental factors; goal repeatedly sampled or strengthened, overcoming proactive interference; subsequent retrieval of this goal aided by priming; associative links must be formed b/w cue and target goal before it is suspended; rehearsal of current goal before it is suspended will increase base-level activation so that it is later more easily reactivated in memory (during interruption lag)
- current work examines preparatory processes at a more fine-grained level to test specific predictions rooted in cog. theory;
- in some studies that encouraged participants to rehearse goals or to make notes during interruption lag - performance actually worsened due to increased interference;
- prospective goal encoding during interruption lag;
- empirical studies concerning role of retrieval cues in interruption recovery are inconclusive;
- a long lag with no primary task information reduced typical performance owing to boredom and perhaps the activation of irrelevant thoughts;
- role of preparatory processes in supporting memory for task goals is an issue that warrants further investigation
- experiments: [Altmann/Trafton 02]: cues linking target goal to features in current context are encoded relatively automatically simply by co-occurrence;
- presence of an interruption lag manipulated by the transition in tasks;
- research suggests that participants can efficiently preplan up to two subgoals ahead at the beginning of a trial, and then execution of this plan is supported by a process of online monitoring and updating;
- errors in goal retrieval may be more frequent in those conditions in which insufficient contextual cues render the suspended goal less active than competing distractors
- experiment 1a: interruption of the ToL task did not appear to affect accuracy of problem solving:
- subject to a 2 (interruption vs. control) x 2 (full-screen vs. corner interruption) RM-ANOVA; sig. main effect of interruption (takes longer in sessions following interruption); main effect of interruption type; sig. interaction; resumption of primary task faster when interruption task in corner; regardless of whether trial was completed in min of 6 moves
- time spent on interruption was non-significant
- task resumption times a lot quicker than the initial planning times, suggesting that some residual knowledge survives the interruption and that participants are actually retrieving old goals rather than simply planning anew;
- in most computer-based interruption studies, the primary task is not visible during the secondary tasks; on-screen interruptions were more disruptive than telephone calls or walk-in visitors [Storch 92], result attributed to task similarity; perhaps performance suffers less when participant is allowed more control over integrating of the two tasks;
- experiment 1b: introduces 3rd condition: full-screen interruption preceded by 2-second pause with display freeze;
- sig. effect of interruption condition obtained; 2s pause followed by full-screen interruption no different from corner interruption, sig. faster than full-screen interruption with no pause; determining the ease of goal retrieval is the availability of task-related cues at the specific point of goal suspension, demonstrates importance of interruption lag; even the briefest opportunity to encode associative cues and/or boost the activation of the target goal is beneficial;
- experiment 2A: how is performance affected if changes are made to the visual display after the interruption? one would expect task resumption to be impeded if these cues are no longer available
- manipulated whether the display that participants returned to was the one they had left at the point of interruption or whether it was different and would therefore not prime retrieval (changing colours of disks in ToL task);
- sig. differences b/w conditions; no difference in duration of interruption; quickest with no interruption, slower w/ interruption, slower if colours changed after break; changes in contextual cues at point of task resumption cause disruption to goal retrieval; possible that any change to visual display would disrupt performance and that disks are not necessarily critical cues to goal retrieval;
- experiment 2B: changing background peg colour and colour of pegs upon task resumption - no difference b/w conditions of peg changing and no changing; subjects warned that colours may change upon task resumption; the disks themselves act as cues;
- experiment 3: presence of an interruption lag to encode task cues before goal suspension should be beneficial only if these cues (disk colours) are still available and unchanged at task resumption;
- 2 (display change) x 2 (interruption lag) RM ANOVA - sig. effect of display change w/ participants slower to resume the task when the colours of disks had been rearranged; main effect of interruption lag did not reach significance; sig. interaction b/w interruption lag and display change: participants sig. quicker to resumer task when the display was not subsequently changed, when colours of disks changed at resumption, benefit of interruption lag was removed; opportunity to encode retrieval cues before onset of an interruption will be useful only if the cues are still available after interruption to prime goal retrieval; time spent on interruption revealed no sig difference b/w conditions;
- one must be cautious in concluding that the longer interruption lag reduced resumption times further;
- discussion: lag before the onset of the second activity found to reduce task resumption times by allowing an opportunity for participants to prepare goals prior to suspension; preparatory time is needed for encoding of retrieval cues, goal retrieval impeded when changes made to returning visual display; no benefit of interruption lag if potential retrieval cues had been altered;
- findings difficult to accommodate within ACT-R; changes to visual display would perhaps affect ease of goal reconstruction;
- context - at points of both goal suspension and retrieval;
- longer interruption lags more beneficial; what is cost-benefit ratio?
- less intrusive interruptions => quicker resumption times;
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- Speier C, Vessey I, Valacich JS. The Effects of Interruptions, Task Complexity, and Information Presentation on Computer-Supported Decision-Making Performance. Decision Sciences. 2003;34(4):771-797. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/j.1540-5414.2003.02292.x
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- Storch N. Does the user interface make interruptions disruptive? A study of interface style and form of interruption. In: Posters and short talks of the 1992 SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM; 1992:14. Available at: http://www.interruptions.net/literature/Storch-DE92011295.pdf.
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On Prospective memory (PM) and interruption/distraction |
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