Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks
Sophie Leroy reports two experiments on what she calls attention residue, the attention that stays with a previous task after a switch. Each began with a word task, then a lexical decision task in which participants judged whether strings of letters were real words, then a task appraising CVs. Some of the real words came from the first task, and a fast response to one of them was the sign that the first task was still active. The abstract reports that difficulty disengaging from an unfinished task hurts performance on the next one. Merely finishing the first task did not remove the effect, but finishing it under time pressure did, and in the second experiment those people did better on the CV task. Leroy's explanation is cognitive closure. The experiments used undergraduates in a laboratory and measure word recognition, not a working day.
Sophie Leroy reports two experiments on what she calls attention residue, the attention that stays with a previous task after a switch. Each began with a word task, then a lexical decision task in which participants judged whether strings of letters were real words, then a task appraising CVs. Some of the real words came from the first task, and a fast response to one of them was the sign that the first task was still active. The abstract reports that difficulty disengaging from an unfinished task hurts performance on the next one. Merely finishing the first task did not remove the effect, but finishing it under time pressure did, and in the second experiment those people did better on the CV task. Leroy's explanation is cognitive closure. The experiments used undergraduates in a laboratory and measure word recognition, not a working day.
Written from the abstract read 2026-10-22 (RePEc and the Elsevier record; full text paywalled), with the design and sample sizes from the BPS Research Digest.
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Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168-181. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002