Attention and intended action in multitasking: An understanding of cognitive workload

•Attention is an important factor concerning cueing of an intended action.•Stimulus driven situation of attention capture has facilitative effect.•Performance decrement is not associated with an increased cognitive workload.•The results have practical significance concerning human errors in multitasking.

The study investigates the effect of attention on prospective memory performance in programmer multitasking (N = 60) incorporating a taxonomical understanding of prospective memory errors. It also presents an analysis of cognitive workload (CWL). The results demonstrate that people are more vulnerable to prospective memory performance failure when there is a situation that one is required to devote more attention in monitoring to identify a cue for an intended action. Omission error is the most prominent among all types of prospective memory error. Analysis reveals that when there is a stimulus driven situation of attention capture, a performance decrement observed in terms of prospective memory is not necessarily concerned with an increase in CWL.