The Effects of Adverse Environmental Conditions on Workload

Abstract

The present study was conducted to investigate the effects of environmental conditions on visual workload. The environmental variables used were temperature, studied at levels of 45°F., WBGT, and 95°F., WBGT; and noise, studied at 83 dBA intermittent noise and 93 dBA continuous noise. Workload was defined as the amount of attention demanded from an operator as measured by performance decrement on a secondary task while performing a primary and secondary task simultaneously. The secondary task was reading random numbers, and the primary task was reading word lists. Significant differences (p<.05) were found between the control condition and all experimental conditions. The low temperature and high temperature-continuous noise conditions were significantly different from the other conditions. Noise and temperature were found to significantly increase workload (p<05).

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