Segmentation of Display Space Interferes with Multitasking

Peripheral displays are useful for organizing information and providing additional screen space for managing information. One design issue is whether peripheral displays should be part of a single large contiguous display space or segmented into many dedicated displays. To test this, an experiment was conducted comparing performance for on-screen versus off-screen displays and bordered (i.e., with a bezel) versus borderless displays. To measure multitask performance, participants were tested under dual-task (document editing and headline checking) and single-task (document editing alone) conditions. Distance between peripheral display and workstation display was also varied (near versus far). Results showed that off-screen peripheral displays reduce editing performance more than on-screen peripheral displays, independent of distance. Peripheral displays with borders were also found to reduce editing performance, but only at far distances. Performance on the headline-checking task was reduced by the far display but not by the bordered display. These results suggest that segmenting display space also segments information space.