Remembering to execute deferred tasks in simulated air traffic control: The impact of interruptions.

Wilson, Micah K.; Farrell, Simon; Visser, Troy A. W.; Loft, Shayne · 2018 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1037/xap0000171

archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified

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Summary

This study investigates how interruptions affect the ability of air traffic controllers to remember and execute deferred tasks, a critical safety concern in high-workload environments. The research addresses the problem of prospective memory failures, where controllers forget to perform intended actions after a period of interposed activity. Motivated by real-world incidents where forgotten conflict resolutions led to safety violations, the authors sought to determine whether the presence and cognitive demand of interruptions impair the resumption of deferred tasks. Specifically, the study examined two types of deferred tasks: resolving a future aircraft conflict (deferred conflict) and deviating from a routine aircraft handoff procedure (deferred handoff). The researchers conducted two experiments using a simulated air traffic control environment with 60 undergraduate participants. Participants managed aircraft by accepting, handing off, and resolving conflicts while performing deferred tasks. The experimental design included three within-subject conditions: no interruption, a blank display interruption (27 seconds), and a cognitively demanding n-back task interruption (27 seconds). Interruptions occurred between the encoding of the deferred task intention and the time required to execute it. The deferred conflict task required participants to resolve a conflict immediately after the interruption, while the deferred handoff task required using a non-routine key press later in the trial. Performance was measured by resumption time, failure rates, and habit-capture errors. Results indicated that interruptions significantly impacted the deferred conflict task but not the deferred handoff task. For the deferred conflict, a blank interruption slowed resumption time compared to the no-interruption condition, but adding the cognitively demanding n-back task did not further increase this delay. However, the n-back interruption increased the probability of failing to resume the deferred conflict compared to the blank interruption. An ex-Gaussian model suggested these failures reflected true forgetting. In contrast, performance on the deferred handoff task, including habit-capture rates and response times, remained unaffected by either type of interruption. Subjective workload ratings did not differ significantly across conditions. The findings suggest that remembering to resume a deferred task in air traffic control relies heavily on frequent interaction with situational cues on the display. The lack of additional delay from the cognitively demanding interruption implies that participants rely on reconstructive strategies using visual cues rather than maintaining internal problem states in memory. Consequently, interruptions that block visual access disrupt this process, leading to slower resumption or forgetting, particularly when the interrupting task is similar in nature to the primary task. However, remembering to deviate from routine procedures appears robust to interruptions, likely because the rich contextual cues on the display support retrieval at the moment of action. These results highlight the importance of display-based cues in supporting prospective memory and suggest that interference-based forgetting is a primary risk in interrupted multitasking scenarios.

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• prospective memory interruptions