Long-term working memory and interrupting messages in human – computer interaction

Abstract

The extent to which memory for information content is reliable, trustworthy, and accurate is crucial in the information age. Being forced to divert attention to interrupting messages is common, however, and can cause memory loss. The memory effects of interrupting messages were investigated in three experiments. In Experiment 1, attending to an interrupting message decreased memory accuracy. Experiment 2, where four interrupting messages were used, replicated this result. In Experiment 3, an interrupting message was shown to be most disturbing when it was semantically very close to the main message. Drawing from a theory of long-term working memory it is argued that interrupting messages can both disrupt the active semantic elaboration of content during encoding and cause semantic interference upon retrieval. Properties of the interrupting message affect the extent and type of errors in remembering. Design implications are discussed.

Acknowledgements

We thank Pauli Salo and Jukka Purma for their co-operation in recruiting participants, Jyrki Oraskari and Tero Haahtela for helping with materials, and B. Bailey, D. McFarlane, and an anonymous referee for their valuable comments on the first version of the manuscript. Parts of this work were done for the first author's Master's Thesis in cognitive science at the University of Helsinki.

Notes

Logarithmic transformation is a preprocedure for normalizing positively skewed response data. Response data in experiments with natural stimuli (such as expository texts used here) are often skewed because of large differences between participants in the amount and quality of prior knowledge.

Reciprocal transformation is used to stabilize a notable increase in variance above a certain threshold. Again, the need for transformation was caused by large individual differences in material-related expertise.