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Controlling interruptions: awareness displays and social motivation for coordination

Published: 06 November 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Spontaneous communication is common in the workplace but can be disruptive. Such communication usually benefits the initiator more than the target of the disruption. Previous research has indicated that awareness displays showing the workload of a target can reduce the harm interruptions inflict, but can increase the cognitive load on interrupters. This paper describes an experiment testing whether team membership influences interrupters' motivation to use awareness displays and whether the informational-intensity of a display influences its utility and cost. Results indicate interrupters use awareness displays to time communication only when they and their partners are rewarded as a team and that this timing improves the target's performance on a continuous attention task. Eye-tracking data shows that monitoring an information-rich display imposes a substantial attentional cost on the interrupters, and that an abstract display provides similar benefit with less distraction.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
November 2004
644 pages
ISBN:1581138105
DOI:10.1145/1031607
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 November 2004

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Author Tags

  1. attention
  2. awareness
  3. coordination
  4. gaze tracking
  5. interruption
  6. social identity

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CSCW04
CSCW04: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
November 6 - 10, 2004
Illinois, Chicago, USA

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CSCW '04 Paper Acceptance Rate 53 of 176 submissions, 30%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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