Irrelevant speech effect in open-plan offices: A laboratory study

What the study found

Irrelevant speech degraded aspects of cognitive task performance in an office-like context.

Limitations

Laboratory setting and selected tasks limit ecological generalization.

Neurodesign interpretation

Open-plan design exposes occupants to other people's semantic content. That turns architecture into a gatekeeper of involuntary language processing.

Possible design implications

Treat speech privacy as a cognitive-performance intervention.

Why it stays in the corpus

Retain as applied confirmation of the irrelevant-speech mechanism.

Study design

Controlled experiment

Population

Adult participants

Setting

Laboratory office simulation

Field

Acoustics

Mechanism

Irrelevant speech, attentional capture

Spatial variable

Open-plan speech acoustics

Keywords

speech, open plan, attention, cognition