Sunday, February 17, 2013

Mental arithmetic and non-speech office noise

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23412582

 2013 Jan-Feb;15(62):73-8. doi: 10.4103/1463-1741.107160.

Mental arithmetic and non-speech office noise: An exploration of interference-by-content.

Source

Department of Applied Psychology, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Cardiff, United Kingdom.

Abstract

An interference-by-content account of auditory distraction - in which the impairment to task performance derives from the similarity of what is being recalled and what is being ignored - was explored concerning mental arithmetic performance. Participants completed both a serial recall and a mental arithmetic task in the presence of quiet, office noise with speech (OS) and office noise without speech (ONS). Both tasks revealed that the two officenoise condition's significantly impaired performance. That the ONS produced this deficit suggests that an interference-by-content account cannot explain impairment to mental arithmetic performance by background sound.

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