Office noise and employee concentration: identifying causes of disruption and potential improvements.

A field study assessed subjective reports of distraction from various office sounds among 88 employees at two sites. In addition, the study examined the amount of exposure the workers had to the noise in order to determine any evidence for habituation. Finally, respondents were asked how they would improve their environment (with respect to noise), and to rate examples of improvements with regards to their job satisfaction and performance. Out of the sample, 99% reported that their concentration was impaired by various components of office noise, especially telephones left ringing at vacant desks and people talking in the background. No evidence for habituation to these sounds was found. These results are interpreted in the light of previous research regarding the effects of noise in offices and the 'irrelevant sound effect'.

Auditory distraction and short-term memory: phenomena and practical implications.

Irrelevant sound tends to break through selective attention and impair cognitive performance. This observation has been brought under systematic scrutiny by laboratory studies measuring interference with memory performance during exposure to irrelevant sound. These studies established that the degree of interference depends on the properties of the irrelevant sound as well as those of the cognitive task. The way in which this interference increases or diminishes as characteristics of the sound and of the cognitive task are changed reveals key functional characteristics of auditory distraction. A number of important practical implications that arise from these studies are discussed, including the finding that relatively quiet background sound will have a marked effect on efficiency in performing cognitive tasks.

Interference from degraded auditory stimuli: linear effects of changing-state in the irrelevant sequence.

Cognitive performance, particularly on a number of tasks involving short-term memory for order, is impaired by the mere presence of irrelevant background sound. The current study examines the features of the irrelevant sound that determine its disruptive potency. Previous research suggests that the amount of variability in an irrelevant stream is related to the degree of disruption of memory. The present experiments used a parametric approach to manipulate degree of change more precisely. Increasing levels of degradation, effected either by low-pass filtering (speech) or by digital manipulation (speech and nonspeech), monotonically decreased the degree of interference. The findings support the following propositions: (i) the degree of physical change within an auditory stream is the primary determinant of the degree of disruption; and, (ii) the effects of irrelevant speech and irrelevant nonspeech sounds are functionally similar.