Keywords

multitasking, dual-task interference, security message, information security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, laboratory experimentation, fMRI, NeuroIS

Abstract

System-generated alerts are ubiquitous in personal computing and, with the proliferation of mobile devices, daily activity. While these interruptions provide timely information, research shows they come at a high cost in terms of increased stress and decreased productivity. This is due to dual-task interference (DTI), a cognitive limitation in which even simple tasks cannot be simultaneously performed without significant performance loss. Although previous research has examined how DTI impacts the performance of a primary task (the task that was interrupted), no research has examined the effect of DTI on the interrupting task. This is an important gap because in many contexts, failing to heed an alert—the interruption itself—can introduce critical vulnerabilities. Using security messages as our context, we address this gap by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how (1) DTI occurs in the brain in response to interruptive alerts, (2) DTI influences message security disregard, and (3) the effects of DTI can be mitigated by finessing the timing of the interruption. We show that neural activation is substantially reduced under a condition of high DTI, and the degree of reduction in turn significantly predicts security disregard. Interestingly, we show that when a message immediately follows a primary task, neural activity in the medial temporal lobe is comparable to when attending to the message is the only task. Further, we apply these findings in an online behavioral experiment in the context of a web-browser warning. We demonstrate a practical way to mitigate the DTI effect by presenting the warning at low-DTI times, and show how cursor-tracking and psychometric measures can be used to validate low-DTI times in other contexts. Our findings suggest that although alerts are pervasive in personal computing, they should be bounded in their presentation. The timing of interruptions strongly influences the occurrence of DTI in the brain, which in turn substantially impacts alert disregard. This paper provides a theoretically-grounded, cost-effective approach to reduce the effects of DTI for a wide variety of interruptive messages that are important but do not require immediate attention.

Original Publication Citation

Jenkins, J., Anderson, B., Vance, A., Kirwan, B., Eargle, D. 2016, “More Harm than Good? How Security Messages that Interrupt Make Us Vulnerable,” Information Systems Research, 27(4), pp. 880-896. ISSN 1047-7047 (print): ISSN 1526-5536 (online).

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2016-8

Permanent URL

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/3910

Publisher

Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS)

Language

English

College

Marriott School of Management

Department

Information Systems

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