Font Size: 

This paper examines the richness of interruption messages affect on cognitive performance quality, and suggests time as an intermediate variable. Human Interruption defined here as the process of coordinating abrupt change in people activities (McFarlane, 1998) that breaks continuity of cognitive focus on a primary task (Coraggio, 1990). The interruptive nature of a message could be associated to its richness. Media Richness Theory - MRT (Daft & Lengel, 1984, 1986; Daft, Lengel, & Trevino, 1987; Trevino, Lengel, & Daft, 1987) is one of the controversial theories in computer mediated communication research (Walther & Burgoon, 1992; King & Xia, 1997; Robert & Dennis, 2005). The theory assumes that media differ in their ability to carry varied types of information and ‘Social Richness’ (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976; Daft & Lengel, 1984; Rice, 1993). This paper advocate Walther’s (2002) criticism on the possible influence time length on performance quality in computer mediated interactions. He argues that experimental design research that makes comparisons between CMC interactions to face-to-face interaction tend to ignore the importance of time as in the process.
An experimental research design used a computerized simulation game to measure participant score as an indicator of cognitive performance. 114 participants were assigned randomly to four groups and one control group. Manipulation achieved by exposing participants to messages (using ‘Push’ technology) in Mobile phones (SMS/MMS) and WWW (text/banner).
Results indicate a significant difference between groups average time of fulfilling cognitive task [F(4)=3.79, p