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The effect of job interruptions on human learning
It is a widely accepted premise of industrial management that an
interruption in the performance of a task will be accompanied by a
decrease in operator skill level upon resuming performance of the
task. Moreover, it has been generally assumed that this loss of
skill is related to several factors including the amount of prior
experience on the task and the duration of the interruption period.
The objective of this research was to examine the influence of both
factors on the amount of forgetting (or retention) and on the learning
rates during prerest and postrest periods.
Twenty college students were trained on a manual assembly task
for either twenty or forty trials. Their performance was interrupted
for either one or three days, at which time they performed twenty
more trials. The recorded production times were fitted to an exponential
function and a power function in two forms.
The experimental findings indicate the amount of skill forgotten
'and retained were influenced by the interruption and both were
statistically significant at 0.5 type I error. In addition, the
results showed a significant difference between the rate of original
learning and relearning. Generally, the lost skill was recovered in
almost three trials. Unexpectedly, the levels of original experience
and retention interval were insignificant. The exponential function
seems to fit the historical data better but future performance tends
to be predicted better by the power function