Habituation and dishabituation to speech and office noise.

Abstract

The authors examined whether background noise can be habituated to in the laboratory by using memory for prose tasks in 3 experiments. Experiment 1 showed that background speech can be habituated to after 20 min exposure and that meaning and repetition had no effect on the degree of habituation seen. Experiment 2 showed that office noise without speech can also be habituated to. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that a 5-min period of quiet, but not a change in voice, was sufficient to partially restore the disruptive effects of the background noise previously habituated to. These results are interpreted in light of current theories regarding the effects of background noise and habituation; practical implications for office planning are discussed.Background noise is reported to be one of the most common forms of interference in open-plan office environments (Boyce, 1974; Keighley & Parkin, 1981;Klitzman & Stellman, 1989), yet very little relevant systematic research has been conducted. The few studies that have addressed the problem have shown that excessive background noise may result hi office worker discomfort and stress, lack of concentration, low levels of performance, and reduced efficiency (Loewen

The role of habituation and attentional orienting in the disruption of short-term memory performance

“…This finding is consistent with previous studies reporting no habituation to repeated stimulus sequences (Ellermeier & Zimmer, 1997;Jones et al, 1997). The absence of habituation is especially interesting given that habituation to auditory distractors has been observed in cross-modal attention paradigms employing primary tasks other than immediate serial recall (Banbury & Berry, 1997;Elliott & Cowan, 2001;Shelton et al, 2009), which suggests that the disruption of immediate serial recall by irrelevant speech is a special type of interference effect with a comparably small component of attentional distraction.…”

“…It seems possible that these periods of silence caused dishabituation. This idea gains plausibility from the finding of Banbury and Berry (1997) that a period of silence can cause an effect of dishabituation in participants previously habituated to irrelevant speech. To eliminate this possible source of dishabituation, the auditory distractors were played continuously and without any interruption in Experiment 2.…”

“…Whereas some studies have shown habituation of the auditory distractor effect (e.g., Banbury & Berry, 1997;Morris & Jones, 1990), others have reported no habituation (e.g., Ellermeier & Zimmer, 1997;Jones, Macken, & Mosdell, 1997;Tremblay, 1997). On the one hand, it is possible to conclude from these results that the auditory distractor effect is largely independent of attention and that an attentional modulation of the auditory distractor effect occurs only under specific circumstances.…”

Artificially induced valence of distractor words increases the effects of irrelevant speech on serial recall

“…Within Cowan's (1999) conception of working memory, this could be explained by the fact that habituation to the repeated distractor occurs, in the process of which fewer and fewer attentional resources are directed toward it. Habituation does indeed seem to occur for noise as complex as background speech or office noise (Banbury & Berry, 1997). The feature model can explain this finding using a similar assumption (see Neath, 2000, for more detail).…”

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

“…Because of the sensitivity of the memory component to irrelevant sound, serial recall tasks are generally preferred [40,41]. The studies by Banbury and Berry [39] show that meaningful noise can negatively affect both prose memory and mental arithmetic tasks, whereas meaningless noise does not affect memory task performance.…”