ABSTRACT

This chapter describes some of basic research on executive control and task-switching, processes that underlie the metatask of task management and provides more applied research that deals with this issue in complex real-world domains and places particular interest in recent work on the psychology of interruptions. Aviation accidents are often the result of poor task management; the operator switches attention from critical tasks of airplane guidance and stability control to deal with an interruption and then fails to bring attention back to the high-priority safety-critical task. The difference is the cost of interruptions, a cost that has been well documented in the literature. Though it is intuitively obvious that a task will be less susceptible to interruption when the operator is highly engaged in it, this effect has been somewhat difficult to capture experimentally or parametrically for the purposes of modeling.