Academic papers concerning Task changes and productivity?

Question

I'm currently writing up a technical report for a course, and I'm to source at least one academic/scientific paper, which is difficult since my focus is on programming (It's an general Engineering course, so for every engineering but Software it's much easier to find a relevant paper to your current project)

I want to just briefly use the amount of productivity lost from task changes, as a rationale for why it is worthwhile to undertake the course of action.

Are any of you aware of a paper that focuses on the productivity of programmers as it relates to task changes/distractions? Tragically I can't just source Joel Spolsky on the topic.

Answer 1

Task interruptions cause memory loss in humans.

Long-term working memory and interrupting messages in human-computer interaction

Source Behaviour & Information Technology archive Volume 23 , Issue 1 (January-February 2004) table of contents

Pages: 53 - 64
Year of Publication: 2004 ISSN:0144-929X

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=993189

Answer 2

http://www.umich.edu/~bcalab/documents/MeyerKieras1999.pdf may be the text you want. And the prof has more documents at http://www.umich.edu/~bcalab/documents/index.html. Make sure you get permissions before using it.

And this article in the Atlantic I read a long time ago dealt with it. It may have some pointers of where to look to. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/multitasking

David Myers at University of Michigan and Marcel Just at CMU are also good sources.