Elizabeth Winder, a masters student from Cardiff University, has been awarded the 2007 British Psychological Society, Division of Occupational Psychology Student Prize for Excellence. Her research looked at the disruptive effects of background speech on performance - a problem that anyone who has worked in an open plan office will recognise.

Elizabeth’s research drew on previous studies that had shown a single voice to be more disruptive to performance than up to six. She also drew on research that had shown, contrary to popular belief, that high levels of acoustic reverberation reduce the disruptive effect of background speech. However, the previous research had not tested the effects of multiple voices beyond six and had used levels of reverberation that were unrealistic for a real office.

Elizabeth conducted two experiments, each time playing a different number of simultaneous voices to students via headphones, whilst they were instructed to remember a series of visually presented digits. In the second experiment she also manipulated the level of reverberation from none, to low (0.4 seconds) and to high (1 second).

The results of the first experiment showed that performance - in this case recall of digits - increased linearly with the number of simultaneous background voices up to twelve, beyond which no further improvement was apparent. In the second experiment, results showed that a combination of fifteen simultaneous background voices and high reverberation resulted in performance nearing that of performance under controlled quiet conditions.

Elizabeth’s work proposes some practical solutions to an ongoing 21^st century problem. It will be interesting to see whether she or other occupational psychologists take this work further.

If you would like to read a more detailed description of Elizabeth’s research, please download her full research.

Elizabeth Winder DOP Student Prize 2007

The Division of Occupational Psychology Student Prize 2007 was sponsored by Pearn Kandola, RHR International and SHL.