Abstract
Interruptions have become a persistent annoyance in our lives; they reduce performance in many domains. Traditional interruption research uses time and errors as measures of disruption. However, in creative tasks, time and errors may not be suitable measures of disruption. This study investigates how interruptions affect content production in a creative task as the amount of content created can be a better indicator of the effect of interruptions. Interruptions were found to reliably reduce the production of content while outlining and writing essays. Moreover, interruptions in both conditions (outlining and writing) reliably reduced the final quality of essays. A carry-over effect from impoverished outlines appeared to have reduced quality of the final essays.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.