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Don’t Disturb Me! Understanding the Impact of Interruptions on Knowledge Work: an Exploratory Neuroimaging Study

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Abstract

As we become more and more connected, the number of technology interruptions are increasing as well. The mechanisms by which a technology interruption takes attention away and ongoing task performance decreases need more investigation. Through neuroimaging, this paper explores how technologies can interrupt concentration, focus and attention of knowledge workers. Subjects were given reading tasks and subjected to a series of randomly timed audio interruptions. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) measurement device, we recorded their brain waves. Consistent with the literature, we found interruptions significantly increased task completion time and decreased task performance. Neuroimaging analysis showed activity in the frontal lobe, temporal lobe and insular cortex of the participants due to interruptions. The paper also investigates differences due to gender and age. The results suggest application developers should consider underlying mechanisms of processing interruptions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the associate editor and two anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback that improved this paper. Many thanks to Dr. James E. Cane for sharing the readings/paragraphs adopted in our experiment. We also thank Vijay Singh and Nandan Moza for their assistance during the experiment.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 2016 (Kalgotra et al. 2016).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Management, Clark University, 950 Main St, Worcester, MA, 01610, USA

    Pankush Kalgotra

  2. Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, 74078, USA

    Ramesh Sharda

  3. Department of Management, Kansas State University, 214 Calvin Hall, Manhattan, KS, 66506, USA

    Roger McHaney

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  1. Pankush Kalgotra
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  2. Ramesh Sharda
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  3. Roger McHaney
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Correspondence to Pankush Kalgotra.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 3 Below are three exemplar observations
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Appendix 2

Table 4 Significant brain activity while correct interrupted readings
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Kalgotra, P., Sharda, R. & McHaney, R. Don’t Disturb Me! Understanding the Impact of Interruptions on Knowledge Work: an Exploratory Neuroimaging Study. Inf Syst Front 21, 1019–1030 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-017-9812-9

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