Designing Experiments to Explore Optimal Timing for Refreshing Breaks During Cognitive Tasks Using Time-Series Changes

Abstract: In recent years, with the advancement of the information society, intellectual work has become increasingly prevalent, heightening the need for strategies to enhance its performance. To prevent a decline in intellectual work performance among office workers, taking short, proactive breaks such as around 20 seconds can be an effective strategy [1]. However, workers tend to avoid taking breaks voluntarily [2]. Thus, this study proposes a new concept of a refreshing break that uses airflow stimuli to notify break time without discomfort and to regain their focus on subsequent tasks through the refreshing effects of airflow stimuli. As the optimal timing for the refreshing break could vary between individuals, the first step of this study was to identify the timing at which individuals desire a refreshing break through a laboratory experiment.In this preliminary experiment, 8 university students participated, and each performed the 2 sessions of the 45-minute comparison task [3]. In the first session, airflow stimuli were automatically exposed at the timings of 5, 35, and 40 minutes to experience the efficacy of a refreshing break. At each timing, the airflow stimuli were exposed for 30 seconds to each participant’s hands. In the second session, participants pressed a button to request airflow whenever they felt the need to take a break with refreshing airflow stimuli, and the 30-second airflow stimuli were applied at those timings. The purpose of this session was to explore the optimal timing for each participant to take a refreshing break that would allow them to maintain concentration.Time-series analysis of concentration levels [4], based on response time data, was conducted to see the relationship between the shift in concentration and break timing. The results suggested that breaks taken at timings when concentration started to decline help restore concentration to higher levels and suppress further decline, whereas breaks taken based solely on subjective judgment were not always well timed. Subjective questionnaires indicated that none of the participants reported discomfort with the airflow stimuli, and thus, there is the possibility that airflow stimuli could serve as a comfortable cue to indicate break timing. Based on these findings, future research should aim to identify individual patterns of concentration decline by increasing the number of experimental sessions, as well as compare adaptive break-timing methods with regular periodic airflow stimulation. This comparison may help determine optimal break timing independent of self-judgment.[1] Dianita, O., et al. (2024) Systematic micro-breaks affect concentration during cognitive comparison tasks: quantitative and qualitative measurements. Advances in Computational Intelligence, 4(7).[2] Finstad, K., et al. (2006) Breaks and task switches in prospective memory. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(5), pp. 705-712.[3] Ueda, K., et al. (2016). Development of "Comparison Task" to measure intellectual concentration affected by room environment. Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Communication and Information Systems, pp. 58-64.[4] Ueda, K., et al. (2022). An analysis of the effect of integrated thermal control on cognitive task performance using time-series changes in intellectual concentration. AHFE 2022, 56, pp. 205-211.

Keywords: Intellectual concentration, Intellectual productivity, Office environment

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007071

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