15.38 Switching between work tasks.

In many businesses, employees are expected to handle multiple projects simultaneously. To work efficiently, this requires the employee to reduce or eliminate cognitions about one task and fully focus on another. Is this easy to do? A study looked at how having to transition between sequential tasks affects worker ability to dedicate their full attention to a given task.¹⁵ Each participant was asked to work on two tasks (each five minutes in length). The first task was a word puzzle, and the second involved reading four résumés and selecting the best candidate. The 78 participants were randomly assigned within a 2 (first task: finished/unfinished) × 2 (time pressure: high/low) design and were evaluated on how many characteristics of the résumés they recalled from Task 2. The following table summarizes the means.

Plot the means and describe the primary features of the data in terms of main effects and interaction.