Attention, polychronicity, and expertise in prospective memory performance: Programmers' vulnerability to habit intrusion error in multitasking

The paper examines prospective memory (ProM) in programmer multitasking and reports administration of a naturalistic atypical action. The study emphasizes on how attention, time orientation, and expertise affect ProM performance in multitasking among a group of computer science and engineering students (N=108). The results suggest that attention play a crucial role in multitasking and ProM performance with respect to whether or not a word display requires more attention to be devoted in monitoring and identifying it for an appropriate action. Polychrons exhibit lesser degree of ProM performance failure than monochrons whereas expertise does not have an effect. Finally, results show that out of overall ProM performance failure, habit intrusion errors comprise of 16.22% occurring 1.75 times in every 10 valid click responses of ProM task. Moreover, experts demonstrate a superior performance over novices in programming.

Research highlights
► Attention, time orientation, and expertise having practical implications on how efficiently one performs programmer multitasking.
► Practical significance with respect to user-interface design, usability, safety, system display designs, human and system performance evaluation, selection, & training.
► The difficulty level of the programming task would have affected the novices and experts in concurrently performing the mouse clicking task.