Abstract
“Reading in peace”: Effects of noise on reading – results from a laboratory study with employees Background: It is a regular day-to-day requirement in many occupations to retrieve information from written material by reading. Therefore, a proofreading task was applied as one of two tasks in this study, in which the effects of different realistic sounds on cognitive performance were investigated. Method: Seventy participants worked on a self-developed reading task, once in a silent condition and once in a condition with one of three background sounds. The sounds, which were kindly provided for this study by other institutions, were recordings from a checkout at a fashion retailer, a multi-space office and a construction site. Thus, the sample for this study consisted of three sound groups. In addition, all participants gave subjective assessments referring to the processing of the tasks with respect to four different aspects. Results: For the entire group, the analysis showed the tendency of a lower number of correctly finished items in the sound condition than in the silent condition. The results were different in the separate sound groups. The subjective assessments showed higher experienced effort and disturbance as well as lower self-assessed concentration in the sound condition than in the silent condition. Conclusions: Adverse effects of background sounds on reading performance were detectable, and they were different in the three sound groups. However, clearer effects were identified for the subjective assessments, i.e., when persons were questioned about their impressions. This underlines the importance of asking people affected by noise, in order to get an insight how the interfering effects are experienced. More detailed survey tools would be required to find out more about the sound characteristics which are responsible for particular effects. Keywords: noise – cognitive performance – proofreading – subjective assessments – workplace
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