Individual differences in susceptibility to the “irrelevant speech effect”

Abstract

Individual differences in objective effects of noise on performance were analyzed with respect to their distribution, temporal stability, and the precision of measurement to be attained. Seventy-two subjects had to memorize sequences of visually presented digits while being exposed to one of three auditory background conditions which were randomly mixed on a trial-by-trial basis: (1) foreign speech; (2) pink noise; and (3) silence. Individual "irrelevant speech effects," operationalized by the difference in recall errors under speech and in silence, were normally distributed over a wide range extending from slight facilitation to severe disruption. When 25 subjects repeated the experiment after four weeks, the individual differences were replicated with a reliability of rtt = 0.45. Internal consistency, a measure of the precision with which individual effects can be measured in a single session, was moderate (alpha = 0.55). However, both retest, and consistency coefficients are severely attenuated by the use of (sound-minus-silence) difference scores, the reliability of which is bound to be considerably lower than that of the original error scores whenever these are correlated. Given that the original error rates in a specific auditory condition can be determined with reliabilities approaching 0.85, it may be concluded that individual performance decrements due to noise can be reliably measured in the "irrelevant speech" paradigm. Self-report measures of noise susceptibility collected to explore potential sources of the large inter-individual variation exhibited only weak relationships with the objectively measured noise effects: Subjects were quite inaccurate in assessing their individual impairment in the three auditory conditions, and a questionnaire-based measure of general noise sensitivity only accounted for a small portion of the variance in objectively measured performance decrements, although in both cases the predictive relationship was much stronger in female than in male subjects.

The Irrelevant Sound Phenomenon Revisited: What Role for Working Memory Capacity?

“…The size of the irrelevant sound effect was operationalized, as in Ellermeier and Zimmer (1997), by subtracting the total number of errors in the control conditions from the total number of errors in the irrelevant sound conditions to produce an irrelevant sound susceptibility (ISS) score for each participant. The results of this procedure are shown in Figure 2, broken down by length of to-be-recalled list.…”

“…It therefore seems unlikely that individual variations in susceptibility to irrelevant sound would differ according to the modality of the to-be-recalled material. Second, and more importantly, the individual differences established by Ellermeier and Zimmer (1997) were established on the standard basis of visual presentation of the to-be-recalled material. Any effect of OSPAN that is concerned only with auditory-auditory selection cannot therefore apply to these data; thus, by extension, it cannot apply to individual variation within the majority of irrelevant sound effect studies.…”

“…This is disappointing because any factor influencing the extent to which an individual suffers from the irrelevant sound effect must, of necessity, be a mechanism governing the very existence of the effect, an issue that is still a matter of some controversy (Baddeley, 1986;Cowan, 1995;Jones et al, 1996;Neath, 2000). The current set of data can, however, be put alongside those of Ellermeier and Zimmer (1997) and Neath et al (2003) in ruling out one possible explanation of the effect. Working memory capacity, at least insofar as it is measured by OSPAN, has no effect on the disruption caused in the irrelevant sound paradigm.…”

Gender differences in office occupant perception of indoor environmental quality (IEQ)

“…In open-plan offices, environmental conditions such as office layout planning, privacy and lighting were evaluated more negatively by female workers compared to males [44]. In studies exploring distraction by noise, Ellermeier and Zimmer [25] reported noise sensitivity quantified by individual performance decrements due to irrelevant noise weren't significantly different between the sexes, whereas Yang et al [43] did find significant interactions between noise, task performance and gender.…”

Impact of noise on self-rated job satisfaction and health in open-plan offices: a structural equation modelling approach

“…The existing literature has not definitively established whether noise sensitivity has any influence on speech privacy. However, there is research showing that the effect of irrelevant speech on recall was affected by noise sensitivity (Ellermeier and Zimmer, 1997). Based on these considerations, the following hypothesis was proposed:…”