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Does predictability play a role in task management? An experimental study with a financial trading simulation

Abstract:

In many complex time-critical tasks such as financial trading, cyber security monitoring, and patient monitoring in critical care, external interruptions and multiple-task situations disrupt the flow of tasks performed by operators leading to errors and accidents. There is an abundance of work reported on interruptions, which informs system designers and researchers on the potential cost of interruptions at different points within a task. However, a gap exists in our understanding of the relationship between interruption disruptiveness and the predictability of events that require an operator's response. To understand this better, we conducted an experiment involving 22 participants and a financial trading task. The experiment involved two levels of predictability (low and high) and two levels of task load (low and high). The experiment showed that task load had an overall negative effect on events. The results also showed that interruptions negatively affected responses to predictable events. However, we found that interruptions did not affect responses to unpredictable events. Overall, our research suggests that to leverage the role of predictability, the goal-activation model should be used to determine the impact of various design options about visual cues and predictable-trend durations. The research also reveals that unpredictable events may be cognitively different from predictable events when understanding the influence of interruptions on work, suggesting that interruption management tools may need to treat the situational context (predictable or unpredictable) differently, in providing a supportive workflow for the management of interruptions.