What Makes Us Resilient to Interruptions? Understanding the Role of Individual Differences in Resumption

• Published in: Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 2011-09, Vol.55 (1), p.296-300
• Main Authors: Werner, Nicole E., Cades, David M., Boehm-Davis, Deborah A., Chang, Jessica, Khan, Hibah, Thi, Gia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1541-9312; 2169-5067
• DOI: 10.1177/1071181311551062

Interruptions are an inescapable reality in our lives and they sometimes lead to unfortunate consequences. Most of the interruptions literature focuses on aspects of the interruption task that makes them more or less disruptive to performance. However, it is important to consider what might make a person resilient to the deleterious effects of interruptions. This research seeks to explore the individual performer and the specific cognitive aspects that might make someone better or worse at dealing with an interruption. Based on the current theory, we predicted that participants with better working memory capacity and spatial abilities would be faster at resuming an interrupted task than those who scored lower on those measures. We found that those that scored higher on the working memory capacity measure were faster at resuming from an interruption and those that scored higher on one of the spatial ability measures (mental rotation) were faster at resuming. The paper folding task measure of spatial ability did not predict interrupted task performance.