VIGILANCE WITH BACKGROUND MUSIC

Abstract

This study draws together two sorts of work: (1) attempts to improve vigilance performance and use of background music in industrial settings, (2) to explore how background music affects performance on a vigilance task. Fourteen subjects were tested on a simple disjunctive reaction time task, which gave eight stimuli in an hour's session. The independent variable was music (a specially programmed Muzak tape recording) vs. continuous noise (a small fan in the experimental room). The performance of subjects who worked while hearing noise did not change significantly during the hour. However, the subjects who heard background music responded significantly better (faster) during the latter two-thirds of the hour than they had at first. Also, the music group performed significantly better in the middle third of the hour than during the last third. Other tests, comparing the groups with each other, rather than themselves, did not demonstrate significant differences with the number of subjects used.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 1963
Accession Number
AD0433624

Entities

People

  • William Wokoun

Organizations

  • Human Engineering Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Army Personnel
  • Biological Sciences
  • Engineering
  • Environmental Protection
  • Human Factors Engineering
  • Military Personnel
  • Military Research
  • New York
  • Operations Research
  • Psychological Phenomena And Processes
  • Psychology
  • Reaction Time
  • Recording Systems
  • Statistical Analysis
  • Students
  • Tape Recording
  • Tapes

Readers

  • Aerospace logistics and air mobility.
  • Auditory Neuroscience/Auditory Physiology.
  • Organizational Psychology.