More Harm Than Good? How Messages That Interrupt Can Make Us Vulnerable
Authors: Jenkins, Jeffrey L.; Anderson, Bonnie Brinton; Vance, Anthony; Kirwan, C. Brock; Eargle, David
Journal: Information Systems Research (2016)
<jats:p> System-generated alerts are ubiquitous in personal computing and, with the proliferation of mobile devices, daily activity. While these interruptions provide timely information, research shows they come at a high cost in terms of increased stress and decreased productivity. This is due to dual-task interference (DTI), a cognitive limitation in which even simple tasks cannot be simultaneously performed without significant performance loss. Although previous research has examined how DTI impacts the performance of a primary task (the task that was interrupted), no research has examined the effect of DTI on the interrupting task. This is an important gap because in many contexts, failing to heed an alert—the interruption itself—can introduce critical vulnerabilities. </jats:p><jats:p> Using security messages as our context, we address this gap by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how (1) DTI occurs in the brain in response to interruptive alerts, (2) DTI influences message security disregard, and (3) the effects of DTI can be mitigated by finessing the timing of the interruption. We show that neural activation is substantially reduced under a cond…