The effect of interruption on the decision-making process

Previous research has shown that interruptions can lead to delays and errors on the interrupted task. Such research, however, seldom considers whether interruptions cause a change in how information is processed. The central question of this research is to determine whether an interruption causes a processing change. We investigate this question in a decision-making paradigm well-suited for examining the decision-making process. Participants are asked to select from a set of risky gambles, each with multiple possible stochastic outcomes. The information gathering process is measured using a mouse-click paradigm. Consistent with past work, interruptions did incur a cost: An interruption increased the time and the amount of information needed to make a decision. Furthermore, after an interruption, participants did seem to partially “restart” the task. Importantly, however, there was no evidence that the information gathering pattern was changed by an interruption. There was also no overall cost to the interruption in terms of choice outcome. These results are consistent with the idea that participants recall a subset of pre-interruption information, which was then incorporated into post-interruption processing.