Investigating the Effect of Nested Interruptions and Levels of Cognitive Demand on Mental States

Interruptions to secondary tasks increase cognitive load and emotion. Interruptions force workers to switch jobs. In the two studies, some of these secondary tasks get interrupted, resulting in multiple tasks that must be resumed, known as nested interruptions. We hypothesize that nested interruption and mental task levels increase the mental load and negative emotions and degrade performance. The participant would have to encode the resumption goals for both the primary and the interrupted secondary tasks in working memory. Initially, a preliminary laboratory experiment was conducted on two participants using Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in which one participant had to complete the three tasks (without and with time press and cognitive demand) without interruption, and the other had to complete the tasks with two kinds of interruption (single and nested interruption). Our research can help managers and staff members manage nested interruptions and workloads better.