Disruption of office‐related tasks by speech and office noise

Abstract

Three experiments examine what is widely reported to be one of the most common forms of interference in open‐plan office environments—the effect of background noise. Experiment 1 investigates whether office noise (with or without speech) is disruptive to two office‐related tasks: memory for prose and mental arithmetic. The results show that whereas office noise with speech disrupts performance on both tasks, office noise without speech disrupts performance on the mental arithmetic task only. Experiment 2 investigates the memory for prose task more closely by varying the duration and the meaning of the background noise. Experiment 3 examines whether the meaning of speech is important to the disruption of a mental arithmetic task. The results show that both speech and office noise can disrupt performance on memory for prose and mental arithmetic tasks, and the effect is independent of the meaning of the irrelevant speech. These results are presented and interpreted in light of current research and theories regarding the effect of background noise.

The Effects of Background Auditory Interference and Extraversion on Creative and Cognitive Task Performance

“…In general, these results stand in contrast to previous work showing that the effects of auditory interference is different for extraverts and introverts (e.g., Banbury & Berry, 1998;Belojevic et al, 2001;Cassidy & MacDonald, 2007;Daoussis & McKelvie, 1986;Furnham & Allas, 1999;Furnham & Bradley, 1997;Furnham & Strbac, 2002). One likely explanation for this discrepancy is that the effects of auditory interference on cognitive abilities are related to task-related factors, such as the complexity of a task.…”

“…They found that introverts performed significantly poorer than extraverts on the reading comprehension task in the presence of music and noise, but that the distracting effects of music and noise were not significantly different when completing prose recall and arithmetic tasks. The contradictions between this and earlier studies (e.g., Banbury, & Berry, 1998) might be due in part to the different tasks that have been used: Konz (1962), for instance, found that music detrimentally affected a letter-matching task but not a manual assembly task (see also Furnham & Bradley, 1997). …”

“…On mental arithmetic and prose recall tasks, for instance, Banbury and Berry (1998) found that performance was significantly poorer in the presence of unpredictable office noise when compared to performance in silence (see also Evans & Johnson, 2000). However, these studies did not consider personality differences in relation to task performance.…”

Developmental change in the cross-modal Stroop effect

“…We discovered that interference from hearing of irrelevant color words while one is naming colors decreased markedly with age. Thus, although noisy environments have been shown to disrupt adult work performance (Banbury & Berry, 1998), our results suggest that children may be even more drastically affected, for instance, by irrelevant spoken language from television or adult conversation.…”

Interference of Speech and Interior Noise of Chinese High-Speed Trains with Task Performance

“…To examine the effect of noise on task performance, a number of tasks, such as prose recall, serial recall or mental arithmetics are commonly used [24,38,39].…”