When students experienced interruptions that prevented rehearsal of the primary task during task suspension they performed more poorly than those who were able to rehearse the primary task goals (Cades, Trafton, Boehm-Davis, & Monk, 2007).Interruptions during periods of high cognitive engagement with the task will also be more disruptive to task resumption than interruptions during periods of lower cognitive engagement. In fact,
when task suspension is under the individuals’ control they are more likely to defer during a period of high (e.g., difficult task) than low (e.g., easy task) cognitive engagement (Salvucci & Bogunovich,2010). Consistent with this, students who read and responded immediately to text messages during a lecture performed more poorly on study material than did those who deferred responding until a more appropriate break point (Rosen, Lim, Carrier, & Cheever, 2011). The individual’s reason for electing task suspension is also important. These might include time constraints, interest or motivation,an impasse in the primary task, subtask completion, or some external cue, but are generally timed to facilitate task performance after resumption (Jin & Dabbish, 2009). For example, Payne, Duggan, and Neth (2007) gave college students word search games (e.g., Scrabble) that were time-limited, varied in difficulty, and could be worked on in any order. Participants made deliberate decisions about when to switch between tasks based on “cognitive foraging” heuristics such as reward optimization, likelihood
of success, or subtask completion.