Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Interruptions are an inevitable part of every day life. Previousresearch suggests that interruptions can decrease performanceand increase errors and response time. Additionally, there isevidence that providing a lag time prior to an interruption canmitigate some of the interruption costs. The goal of this pa-per is to investigate the effects of interruptions and interrup-tion lags and explore possible strategies to attenuate interrup-tion costs. A novel sequential decision-making paradigm wasused, where the difficulty of the task and type of interruptionwere the two experimental manipulations. The results indicatethat there is a potential benefit to including a lag time whenpresented with interruptions.