01054314

Component

This paper describes how considerable effort has been directed toward investigating the possible effects of noise on task and cognitive performance in recent years. Researchers have proven that noise affects human significantly both physically and psychologically. It is well accepted in the scientific community that exposure to high-intensity noise in community or work settings is often harmful to the health and behavior of large segments of the exposed populations. Job and task performance can also be greatly affected by the presence of loud noise. This paper reports the outcomes of a study that was aimed to experimentally evaluate the effects of different kinds of sounds on task performance and the psychological response. Although previous studies touched upon many aspects of noise and task performance, our experiment was specifically designed to investigate the impact of different types of sounds on testing performance of different types of cognitive tasks. It is of interest to determine the situations when the source of distraction used in this study appears to be annoying and the same source appears to be pleasing and therefore negatively or positively affect performance. Most of the research work has shown adverse effects of loud noise on performance. However, this research shows that performance varies with different types of sounds and different tasks thus our study in addition to psychophysiological noise effects, evaluates positive as well as negative effect on task performance with different sounds at the same loudness.

01054353

English

pp 676-683

2004

Noise-Con 04. The 2004 National Conference on Noise Control Engineering

CD-ROM

Figures (4) ; References (25)

Behavior; Noise; Noise control; Noise sources; Psychology; Sound; Sound; Sound level; Sound level meters; Sound transmission

Energy; Environment; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I15: Environment

TRIS, TRB

Jul 25 2007 5:45PM