The influence of interruptions on the management of multiple tasks in self-structured environments

In everyday life, we usually handle a variety of stimuli and tasks. While research has primarily investigated behavior in externally structured situations in which participants have to adhere to a predefined processing sequence and strategy, in reality it is often the case that we have to deal with these situations ourselves. There are also frequent interruptions, for example in the form of additional tasks. We developed an experimentally controlled setting of such a situation to examine the processing behavior and the resulting effects as well as variables potentially determine the behavior. Therefore, we used a self-structured paradigm in which participants were confronted with a complex task environment. This environment contained a multitude of target items and three different tasks had to be accomplished while further interruptive tasks had to be completed. The interruptive tasks occurred at irregular intervals while the self-structured paradigm was being processed. Two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 was a pilot experiment in which initial hypotheses were tested and further exploratory analyses were conducted. The preregistered Experiment 2 served to replicate these findings. Our results confirmed the occurrence of switch costs for all types of task switches. Furthermore, we identified two stable strategies for processing the target items. We found initial evidence that the choice of strategy is associated with the sensitivity of the behavioral inhibition system and polychronicity. The processing of the interruptive tasks varied slightly over time. Early processing of the interruptive tasks occurred primarily when these interruptive tasks were new and tended to be associated with positive experience and better performance on these tasks.