Decision support and vulnerability to interruption in a dynamic multitasking environment

Abstract

Using a microworld simulation of maritime decision making, we compared two decision support systems (DSS) in their impact upon recovery from interruption. The Temporal Overview Display (TOD) and Change History Table (CHT) – designed to support temporal awareness and change detection, respectively – have previously proven useful in improving situation awareness; however, evaluation of support tools for multitasking environments should not be limited to the specific aspects of the task that they were designed to augment. Using a combination of performance, self-report, and eye-tracking measures, we find that both DSS counter-intuitively have a negative effect on performance. Resumption lags are increased, elevated post-interruption decision-making times persist for longer, and defensive effectiveness is impaired relative to No-DSS. Eye-tracking measures indicate that in the baseline condition, participants tend to encode the visual display more broadly, where as those in the two DSS conditions may have experienced a degree of attentional tunnelling due to high workload. We suggest that for a support tool to be beneficial it should ease the burden on attentional resources so that these can be used for reconstructing a mental model of the post-interruption scene.