There have been many studies on improving intellectual concentration. Concentration on intellectual work tends to decrease over time, and this needs to be prevented to improve intellectual concentration. In conventional office work, for example, a 10-minute break was taken every hour, but in this case, concentration drops by the next break. Therefore, there is a possibility of suppressing the decline in intellectual concentration by interspersing short breaks of a few seconds to a few tens of seconds in a shorter cycle than this. In this study, we named this break "micro-refresh" and aimed to show its effect on improving intellectual concentration by experiments, and then to study the environmental control method to present it appropriately in the actual working environment. The "micro-refresh" in this study differs from the conventional "microbreak" in that it effectively encourages office workers to refresh themselves in a short period of time. In other words, this research aims to actively encourage office workers to refresh themselves through some kind of action, such as controlling the indoor environment.Therefore, as a basis for this study, it was firstly confirmed that the effect of micro-refresh can be measured quantitatively. Short breaks of a few seconds to tens of seconds were forcibly given to the office workers during the cognitive task, and the difference in intellectual concentration was confirmed using objective indicators. In addition, the difference in subjective perception of fatigue and workload was also confirmed by several questionnaires.In this experiment, a comparison problem developed by Ueda et al1). was used as a cognitive task. As a simulated micro-refresh, a system, in which the screen changes to gray when an arbitrary time elapses and the answer to the problem being solved at that time is completed, was implemented. The interval between the screen changing was set to 7 minutes and 30 seconds, and the time until the changed screen returned to normal was set to 20 seconds. Participants performed a 25-minute cognitive task with and without the simulated micro-refresh. Their intellectual concentration was measured as an index, “CTR (Concentration Time Ratio)”, which expresses concentration time ratio among total working time and was calculated from response time data of the cognitive task. In addition, this experiment measured participants’ fatigue and workload through several questionnaires; (1) Progress questionnaire asking about subjective level of concentration and fatigue (2) NASA-TLX asking about workload (3) Subjective symptom screening capturing changes in fatigue status over time.At this point, the experiment is not yet completed, but it will be completed by the time the full paper is submitted. From the data obtained, it will be shown that the response time data, CTR, and participants’ fatigue and workload are able to be measured and it will be discussed that whether simulated micro-break prevent CTR from decreasing or reduce participants’ fatigue and workload.1) Kimi Ueda, Hiroshi Shimoda, Hirotake Ishii, Fumiaki Obayashi, Kazuhiro Taniguchi: Development of a New Cognitive Task to Measure Intellectual Concentration Affected by Room Environment, The Fifth International Conference on Human-Environment System, 2016.
Micro-breaks are very short time breaks such as several tens of seconds during intellectual work and they are expected to be effective to recover intellectual concentration. A controlled laboratory experiment was conducted to examine the effect of the micro-breaks focusing on individual characteristics. Thirty-one participants were recruited in this study performing cognitive comparison tasks for 25 minutes on a tablet PC under two conditions, which are micro-break intervention condition and no micro-break intervention condition. Quantitative answering times were analyzed to find the individual's performance characteristic concerning the micro-breaks intervention. Five patterns grouping of performance variations were determined utilizing the moving average and locally-weighted scatterplot smoother data. The result shows that 42% of the total participants resulted that micro-breaks condition outperformed the condition without micro-breaks during all the task periods incorporated in the first pattern group. The second pattern group does not show the eminence of micro-breaks towards 10% of total participants. In the third pattern group, the superiority of the micro-breaks appears after a certain time and not from the beginning of the task shown by 26% of participants' data. The degradation of the micro-break effectiveness is shown in a fourth pattern group for 19% of the sample group. In the last pattern group, both the superiority and deterioration of the micro-break are found in 3% of the data. The results demonstrate each individual's characteristic in responding to the micro-breaks intervention during cognitive task presented in the five patterns group. The majority of the participants benefited from the micro-breaks indicated by more stable and faster performance compared to the no micro-breaks condition.
There have been many studies on improving intellectual concentration. Concentration on intellectual work such as working in office tends to decrease over time, and this needs to be prevented in order to improve intellectual work efficiency. In conventional office work, for example, a 10-minute break was taken every hour. However, in this case, their concentration is gradually getting lower by the next break. There is a possibility of suppressing the decline in intellectual concentration by interspersing short breaks of a few seconds to a few tens of seconds and give environmental stimulus to improve their refresh in a shorter cycle. In this study, we named this break "micro-refresh" and aimed to show its effect on improving intellectual concentration by experiments, and then to study the environmental control method to introduce it appropriately in the actual working environment. The "micro-refresh" differs from the conventional "microbreak" in that it effectively encourages office workers to refresh themselves in a short period of time. In other words, this research aims to actively encourage office workers to refresh themselves through some kind of stimuli, such as controlling the office room environment.As a basis for this study, therefore, it should be firstly confirmed by an experiment that the effect of micro-refresh can be measured quantitatively. Especially, short breaks of a few seconds to tens of seconds were forcibly given to the experimental participants during the cognitive task, and the difference in intellectual concentration was confirmed using objective indicators.In this measurement, a comparison problem developed by Ueda et al1). was used as a cognitive task. As a simulated micro-refresh, an experimental system has been developed in which the screen changes to all gray after an arbitrary time has passed and the answer to the problem being solved at that time is completed. The interval between the screen changing was set to 7 minutes and 30 seconds, and the time until the changed screen returned to the task was set to 20 seconds. Three university faculty members performed a 25-minute cognitive task with and without the simulated micro-refresh. Their intellectual concentration was measured as an index, “CTR (Concentration Time Ratio)”1), which expresses concentration time ratio among total working time and was calculated from response time data of the cognitive task. As a result, all three participants had higher CTR when the simulated micro-refresh was given than those without it. Although this was just a preliminary experiment and the measurement was insufficient, it suggested that the effect of micro-refresh on intellectual concentration could be measured quantitatively and that micro-refresh might be effective in improving intellectual concentration.As a future prospect, controlled experiments with a larger number of participants to show the effect of micro-refresh should be conducted, and then environmental control methods that can appropriately introduce micro-refresh in actual work environments should be studied.1) Kimi Ueda, Hiroshi Shimoda, Hirotake Ishii, Fumiaki Obayashi, Kazuhiro Taniguchi: Development of a New Cognitive Task to Measure Intellectual Concentration Affected by Room Environment, The Fifth International Conference on Human-Environment System, 2016.
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