Knowledge work is frequently interrupted. Interruptions enable
collaboration and bring timely information, but they disrupt
the fragile context of ongoing activities. Computers, now
ubiquitous in knowledge work, have improved in their ability
to track and restore digital context (documents and files), but
they do a poor job of helping users restore mental context: the
ideas, intentions, and motivations behind their work. Thumbnail
images are an efficient way to help computer users refind
documents; we ask if they can also be used to restore
mental context. We tested how three manipulations to thumbnails
of personal computer screenshots impact their ability to
help viewers recognize past activities and recall accurate and
detailed context. In a 2-week study we found that thumbnails
of portions of the screen need to be larger than thumbnails of
the entire screen for successful activity recognition and that
static screenshots prompted more accurate contextual recall
than animations.