Stansfeld and Matheson revealed that children exposed to chronic environmental noise had poorer auditory discrimination and speech perception as well as poorer memory requiring high processing demands. They also claimed that noise can contribute to indirectly increasing the rate of accidents by causing stress, attention loss, and blood pressure increases, etc. noted that noise is one factor that can increase the risk of accidents in the workplace by interfering with communication. Although some studies showed the positive effects of noise on cognitive performance, multiple studies have demonstrated the negative effects of noise. Noise has been emerging as one of the main causes of negative cognitive task performance in industrial sites. Indeed, a number of studies have emphasized that an increase in a worker’s cognitive workload or a decrease in their cognitive task performance can lead to human errors and serious industrial accidents. Hence, it is known that human error remains the most common contributing factor in fatal accidents worldwide, and the ineffective mental workload of operators plays a role in such accidents. , the industrial accident rate due to human error was found to be high in Korea as well out of 351 cases of serious accidents that occurred in Korea in 2013, 117 (33.7%) were related to human error. In a similar vein, Hals found that human error was a primary causal factor in 70–80% of accidents in the oil and gas industry. Dinges also stated that unintentional human errors in the workplace, which can include mistakes by operators, maintenance, and management, were the most frequently identified root causes of accidents, contributing significantly to between 30% and 90% of all serious incidents across industries. argued that human error was one of the major reasons for industrial accidents, emphasizing the need to introduce new technologies to prevent it. Analyses of major accidents have concluded that human errors on the part of operators, designers, or managers have played a major role in their occurrence. These findings may be useful for the work-space designs that prevent/minimize human errors and industrial accidents by improving the cognitive task performance of workers in field-noise environments.ĭuring the past few decades, technological evolution has drastically changed the nature of the human factor problems that one faces in relation to industrial safety. The major findings were that: (1) the field-noise environment did not affect the scores of the Corsi block-tapping and 3-back tasks, significantly affecting only the Digit span task score (decreased by 15.2%, p < 0.01) and (2) the Digit span task performance in the field-noise environment was improved by 17.9% ( p < 0.05) when mixed noise was provided as a type of auditory pre-stimulation. The three STM/WM tasks were the Corsi block-tapping, Digit span, and 3-back tasks, corresponding to the visuospatial sketchpad, the phonological loop, and the central executive of WM, respectively. In the second experiment, the participants performed each of the three basic STM/WM tasks in a field-noise environment after they were provided with one of four different auditory pre-stimulations (quiet noise, white noise, field noise, and mixed (white and field) noise). In the first experiment, a total of 24 participants performed each of three basic short-term/working memory (STM/WM) tasks under two different experimental conditions (quiet-noise environment and field-noise environment) depending on the presence or absence of field noise. To accomplish these research objectives, two major experiments were conducted. Therefore, this study aimed to empirically investigate: (1) the effects of noisy environments on the performances of cognitive tasks related to different functions of working memory and (2) the effects of auditory pre-stimulation on the performances of cognitive tasks in a field-noise environment. Accordingly, studies on the effects of pre-stimulation in a noisy environment are still lacking. However, most previous studies demonstrated the effectiveness of the auditory pre-stimulation in a quiet environment. In recent years, auditory pre-stimulation has been considered as a means of preventing human errors by improving workers’ cognitive task performance. The accident rate due to human errors in industrial fields has been consistently high over the past few decades, and noise has been emerging as one of the main causes of human errors.
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