PhD Ceremony I. (Ioanna) Katidioti: Understanding and managing interruptions, How to avoid watching cat videos all day long

There are constant interruptions that keep interfering with our workday and slow us down. Half of these interruptions are our own fault: emails, social media, coffee breaks… In my thesis, I tried to understand and manage interruptions, with the hope of uncovering information that could reduce their disruptive effect.
First, I found that when the cognitive resources (such as vision, language processing, hearing etc.) for an interruption are free, people will be distracted or self-interrupt. While performing a task, people faced a slow browser and started chatting to stay occupied. However, they ended up being slower in the main task. In another study, the fewer visual resources a task required, the more people got distracted by a cat video playing in the background. Surprisingly, the difficulty level of the task did not affect how distracted they were, the availability of visual resources was the disruptive factor.
Second, I discovered that being externally interrupted (e.g. by an app that decides when you will check your emails) is less disruptive than self-interrupting. The decision to self-interrupt takes time, which was also reflected in the size of our pupil, a well-known measure of cognitive activity. Finally, I constructed an interruption management system that interrupted people on optimal moments, which were decided by the changes in their pupil dilation.

Dissertation: http://hdl.handle.net/11370/e29d4f4c-374e-4c45-b9ab-54fec431e2fc