Simon Banbury

TL;DR: In this article, the authors introduce engineering psychology and human performance, and present an overview of the major aspects of engineering psychology, including: Signal Detection, Information Theory and Absolute Judgment, Attention in Perception and Display Space, Spatial Displays, Memory and Training 8. Decision Making 9. Selection of Action 10. Attention, Time sharing and Workload 11. Mental Workload, Stress, and Individual Differences: Cognitive and Neuroergonomic Perspectives 12. Automation 13. Epilogue

TL;DR: In this paper, a field study assessed subjective reports of distraction from various office sounds among 88 employees at two sites and found that 99% reported that their concentration was impaired by various components of office noise, especially telephones left ringing at vacant desks and people talking in the background.

TL;DR: The finding that relatively quiet background sound will have a marked effect on efficiency in performing cognitive tasks and the way in which this interference increases or diminishes as characteristics of the sound and the cognitive task are changed reveals key functional characteristics of auditory distraction.

TL;DR: In this article, the effect of background noise in open-plan office environments was investigated. And the results showed 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 irrelevant speech.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined whether background noise can be habituated to in the laboratory by using memory for prose tasks in 3 experiments, and they found that background speech was habituated after 20 min exposure and that meaning and repetition had no effect on the degree of habituation seen.