The effects of task interruption and information presentation on individual decision making

Interrupted work environments are commonplace in today's organizations. In addition, organizational work is increasingly performed using some form of computer support. Consequently, there is a need to examine how the design and delivery of information systems can help to mitigate the potentially deleterious effects of interruptions on decision-maker performance. This paper reports the results of two experiments that investigate the influence of interruptions on different types of tasks and the ability of information presentation formats to alleviate them. Interruptions were found to facilitate performance on simple tasks, while inhibiting performance on more complex tasks. Furthermore, there was some evidence that the frequency of interruptions and similarity of the content of the primary and interruption tasks also negatively influenced performance. Finally, interruptions moderated the relationship between information presentation format and specific types of tasks.