Information systems provide users with valuable information that is relevant to users’ tasks, as well as irrelevant information that is not helpful to the user. Irrelevant information become a distraction and distract the users from their current task, there by impairing performance. Guided by distraction-conflict theory, processing efficiency theory, attentional control theory, cognitive load theory and memory for goals theory, this study investigated the distraction effect by exploring the research question, “How do task-irrelevant distractions interrupt the users of information systems and influence their performance?”. To investigate how distractions from technology influence users’ performance, this experimental research examined the relationship between the variables of distraction, cognitive load, anxiety and task performance. Data were gathered through lab experiment using imotion eye tracking system. The major findings revealed that task-irrelevant distraction negatively influenced the users by increase anxiety and cognitive load as well as increase the time devoted to primary task. We also found that the cognitive load partially mediates the relationship between distraction and time spending on task.

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No description available.

This study explored the relationship between general or real-world multitasking and task specific multitasking as related to the real time strategy game Star Craft II: Wings of Liberty (Blizzard, 2010). In addition to exploring this relationship, the research also attempted to examine the effect task specific multitasking training had within Star Craft II. Data for the current research were collected in two phases. Phase one consisted of a pre/post-test design, with random assignment to either the gamer-control or experimental group. Participants in the experimental group were asked to complete 10 to 11 hours on the Star Craft II based Multitasking Trainer (stet_tcl, 2010) in between two, five trial blocks of the SynWin (Acivity Research Services, 2000); a computer based general multitasking measure. Participants in the gamer-control group were asked to complete 10 to 11 hours of one-versus-one Star Craft II ladder matches, and complete the same pre/post-test SynWin battery. Both groups were asked to send the researcher their three most recent one-versus-one ladder matches prior to starting the assigned protocol, and three more upon completion. Phase two participants only completed the pre-test SynWin battery, and were assigned to either the non-gamer control or gaming-control groups based on their weekly use of PC/console games and Star Craft II play. Inclusion in the non-gamer control group required less than one hour of PC/console gaming per week. Participants in the gaming-control group were asked to submit their three most recent one-versus-one Star Craft II ladder replays. For the purpose of this research, the operational definition for Star Craft II multitasking was effective actions per-minute (EAPM), a subset of actions per-minute (APM). Analysis of the gathered data from both phases of recruitment indicated a moderately strong positive relationship between SynWin scores and EAPM values (r = 0.636, p = 0.014). An evaluation of the effectiveness of the multitasking trainer was not completed due to a lack of adequate participation. / Kinesiology

Användningen av informations- och kommunikationsteknik (IKT) ökar kraftigt och påverkar både samhället och människan. Smartphonen är en del av denna teknik och har påverkat människan samt samhället i ännu större utsträckning på grund av sin portabilitet. Denna påverkan är viktig att belysa då den innebär nya utmaningar som måste hanteras för att kunna bibehålla ett hållbart samhälle. Denna studie har undersökt hur smartphones påverkar människor i deras vardagliga liv med en djupare inblick i de sociala sammanhangen. Teorier inom IKT, smartphoneanvändning, samt beroende har legat till grund för det teoretiska ramverket medan observationer samt en enkätundersökning har legat till grund för empirin. Fokus har legat på unga vuxna och datan som samlats in har analyserats kvalitativt och sedan diskuterats utifrån teorin. Undersökningen visade på ett tydligt mönster gällande negativ inverkan på sociala konversationer. Det framgick tydligt att mycket fokus tillägnades smartphonen istället för konversationen i sig. Förutom en identifikation kring att de sociala sammanhangen påverkades negativt så gick det även att påvisa andra faktorer som påverkades. Det är tydligt att lagar har brutits, sömn påverkats och att individer har blivit överväldigade av information på grund av smartphonen. Sammanfattningsvis så är det viktigt att lyfta fram den psykiska påverkan som studien påvisar att smartphones haft på människor, så att medvetenheten gällande detta kan öka. / The use of information and communication technology (ICT) is evolving in a fast pace and effects both society and humans. Smartphones is a part of this technique and effects even more due to its portability. It is important to shed light on this effects as it poses new challenges which needs to be handle in order to maintain a sustainable society. This thesis has explored the growing problem of smartphones and how they affect the ordinary life of humans. Theories within ICT, smartphone usage and addiction were the foundation of the theoretical framework while observations and a questionnaire was used to collect the empirical data. The focus has been on young adults and the collected data were analyzed qualitatively and thereafter discussed on the theoretical framework as basis. The study showed a pattern regarding negative impact on social conversations due to the smartphone. It was clear that a lot of focus were dedicated to the smartphone instead of the conversation. Aside from that it was clear that laws been broken, sleep affected and that people have become overwhelmed by information due to the smartphone. In conclusion, it is important to highlight the psychological impact that the study shows that smartphones had on people, so that the awareness regarding this can increase.

In the last decade, the use of digital devices such as television, smartphones, computers, laptops, and tablets has drastically increased. The development of technology has made it possible for the individual to be qickly stimulated and have information available at anytime and anywhere through various digital devices. This development has increased the screen time on these digital devices, which potentially can have psychological effects and influence attentional abilities. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate relationships between screen use in everyday life and different forms of attention (focused attention, devided attention, sustained attention, selective attention, motivated attention) in adults over 18 years of age. A questionnaire with questions about screen time and perceived attention in everyday life was sent out and answered online by total of 26 participants. A correlation analysis was performed on the collected data and the results showed no significant correlation between respective type of attention (including a measure of total attention) and screen time. Several factors may have influenced the results of this study, such as sample size, age group, choice of method, and that an objective measure of attention was not used.

Individuals are required to manage multiple tasks which require strategic allocation of time and effort to ensure goals are reached efficiently. By providing the worker with autonomy over their work, performance and worker well-being have improved. This increased control allows individuals to organize work according to the needs of the body, which prevents fatigue leading to improved productivity. When given the option, humans tend to switch between tasks frequently. This behaviour can be used to determine the change in self-regulation strategies. An understanding of human task-switching behaviour is important for the design of job rotation systems. However, there is a lack of evidence explaining the factors motivating the need to switch between tasks. This study aims to use physiological, subjective and behavioural measures to explain the factors influencing selfregulation through the act of task-switching. Three primary hypotheses were developed to explain the factors underlying taskswitching behaviour. It was hypothesized that the degree of boredom experienced, the effort required to perform the task and the resource usage induced by the task are factors responsible in deciding task switching behaviour. Participants (17 males and 17 females) switched freely between five different information-processing tasks for the 45 minutes. Participants were allowed to switch back and forth between tasks and did not have to conduct all five tasks. The following measures were recorded during the experiment: subjective measures of boredom, mental effort, task frustration and perceived performance of the tasks; energy consumption and physiological measures of effort (HR, HRV and body temperature) and behavioural measures, including duration and frequency of task. Perceived boredom was found to differ among the tasks and before and after the experiment. The average boredom rating at each task transition for all tasks exceeded a score of 2.5 out of a possible 4. There were no significant changes in physiological measures between the beginning and end of the task trials. However, changes in physiological measures showed a decrease in effort investment following task transition. Heart rate variability was lower for externally-paced tasks than for self-paced tasks, despite the differences in cognitive demands. The most frequent task-switch combination occurred between tasks of high and low cognitive demand. The least frequent task-switching combination occurred between tasks of similar characteristics, which produced no differences in physiological responses. Task-switching behaviour was influenced by the degree of boredom, and therefore more time was spent on less monotonous tasks. The level of physiological effort required for the task affected task-switching behaviour. Task switches were made before any changes in effort took place in an attempt to maintain task efficiency. It appears plausible that a task switch was made to reduce effort investment and activation levels. The type of information processing resources used by different tasks affected the task-switching combinations. Individuals tended to switch between tasks of differing resources so that those in limited supply were able to replenish. Therefore the findings from this study can potentially be used to improve the design of job rotation systems. Such improvements may enhance productivity and worker well-being by inhibiting the onset of down regulation and fatigue processes. This study showed that autonomy is necessary for individuals to regulate behaviour to suit human needs. / Microsoft� Office Word 2007 / Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in

(in English): The aim of this thesis is to analyze, how exactly the constant connectivity, social media activity, and online presence influences productivity and performance of university students, presumably also their grades. The data used in the analysis and my practical part were collected from a questionnaire translated by me, the source of which was a study created in 2016 (Lau, 2016). The target group of the research were students at Czech universities, regardless of the type or level of study, who actively use social media, often for communication related to their academic preparations. The subject of the research is to find out how social media influences students in their academic activities, and whether the findings that were presented in the source study can also be applied to the dataset collected for this thesis. The final result of the thesis should be mainly new knowledge from this field within the Czech university environment and possible recommendations.

Many activities are comprised of temporally dependent events that must be executed in a specific chronological order. Supportive software applications must preserve these temporal dependencies. Whenever the processing of this type of an application includes transactions submitted to a database that is shared with other such applications, the transaction concurrency control mechanisms within the database must also preserve the temporal dependencies. A basis for preserving temporal dependencies is established by using (within the applications and databases) real-time timestamps to identify and order events and transactions. The use of optimistic approaches to transaction concurrency control can be undesirable in such situations, as they allow incorrect results for database read operations. Although the incorrectness is detected prior to transaction committal and the corresponding transaction(s) restarted, the impact on the application or entity that submitted the transaction can be too costly. Three transaction concurrency control algorithms are proposed in this dissertation. These algorithms are based on timestamp ordering, and are designed to preserve temporal dependencies existing among data-dependent transactions. The algorithms produce execution schedules that are equivalent to temporally ordered serial schedules, where the temporal order is established by the transactions' start times. The algorithms provide this equivalence while supporting currency to the extent out-of-order commits and reads. With respect to the stated concern with optimistic approaches, two of the proposed algorithms are risk-free and return to read operations only committed data-item values. Risk with the third algorithm is greatly reduced by its conservative bias. All three algorithms avoid deadlock while providing risk-free or reduced-risk operation. The performance of the algorithms is determined analytically and with experimentation. Experiments are performed using functional database management system models that implement the proposed algorithms and the well-known Conservative Multiversion Timestamp Ordering algorithm.

In both the private and work spheres, multitasking among three or more activities has become and is continuing to evolve as a pervasive element of everyday life, and recent technological advances only seem to be exacerbating the process. Despite attempts to understand the mental processes that let humans successfully multitask, little is known about the functional cognitive level at which these mental processes take place. This thesis makes a case for the involvement of spatial ability (among other cognitive abilities) in successful multitasking behavior. It focuses on the importance of the cognitive off-loading of executive control demands onto spatial ability, due to the inherent complexity of relationships between task goals and deadlines in multitasking scenarios. Importantly, it presents a working hypothesis—the spatiotemporal hypothesis of multitasking—as a tool for making specific predictions about multitasking performance, based on individual and sex differences in spatial ability. In Study 1, individual differences in spatial ability and executive functions emerged as independent predictors of multitasking performance. When spatial ability was decomposed into its subcomponents, only the coordinate (metric), but not categorical (nonmetric), processing of spatial relations was related to multitasking performance. Males outperformed females in both spatial ability and multitasking, and the effects were moderated by menstrual changes, in that sex differences in coordinate spatial processing and multitasking were observed between males and females in the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, but not between males and females at menses. In Study II, multitasking performance reflected age- and sex-related differences in executive functioning and spatial ability, suggesting that executive functions contribute to multitasking performance across the adult life span, and that reliance on spatial skills for coordinating deadlines is reduced with advancing age. The results of Study III, in which the spatiotemporal hypothesis was directly scrutinized, suggest that the spatial disruption of multiple deadlines interferes with multitasking performance. Overall, these findings suggest that multitasking performance, under certain conditions, reflects independent contributions of spatial ability and executive functioning. Moreover, the results support the distinction between categorical and coordinate spatial processing, suggesting that these two basic relational processes are selectively affected by female sex hormones and are differentially effective, even across the age span, in transforming and handling temporal patterns as spatial relations in the context of multitasking. Finally, fluctuations of sex hormones exhibit a modulating effect on sex differences in spatial ability and multitasking performance. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Manuscript.</p>