In contemporary society interruptions and disruptions are widely present at the workplace and in everyday life. For example, a colleague might drop by for a chat or a postman might interrupt us while preparing lunch. Besides that, we receive a whole lot of notifications, calls, emails and messages on a daily basis, and to at least some of them we have to respond immediately. It was estimated that task interruptions consume approximately 28% of a working day, which leads to an economic loss up to several billions of dollars in the USA only. What are the psychological effects of task interruptions? Is every interruption equally disruptive? Can task interruptions have positive effects? In this lecture interruptions will be defined as a special case of multitasking and the most important aspects of interruption tasks that influence the performance in cognitive tasks will be presented.

Tara Radovic (Belgrade, 1990) holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in psychology from Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, as well as a Master’s degree in cognitive science from University of Osnabrueck done in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. As a research assistant and a PhD candidate at Technische Universitaet Berlin she investigates the effects of task interruptions on the performance in cognitive tasks and she is an author of several scientific papers on this topic. As a teaching assistant at the TU Berlin she was involved in courses Cognitive psychology and Multitasking, which are her primary areas of interest.