Effects of Acoustic Environment on the Psychological State Based on Visual Cognitive Work in Open-plan Office

Acoustic environment is one of the significant factors affecting work performance in open-plan office. Previous studies focused mainly on the impact of sound environment on work efficiency, and lack of mental activities. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the effects of different sound source types, sound pressure levels (SPLs), and reverberation times (RTs) on work psychological states based on visual cognitive work. Forty-three participants were recruited to complete the cognitive tasks and questionnaires from the perspective of work emotion, motivation, and mental fatigue.The following results were found: first, sound source types had a significant impact on participants psychological state. Generally, apart from music sound, and natural sound, sound sources caused different degrees of annoyance, disturbance and fatigue to work performance, among which air-conditioning noise was the most disturbing one. Second, work psychological states were significantly different under different SPLs of air-conditioning noise, with the increase of SPL value, pleasure degree and work motivation decreased while the fatigue degree increased. Third, speech noise with different RTs had no significant effects on the psychological state. This study shows that the acoustic design of sound sources and SPL are expected to adjust the employees psychological state engaged in visual cognition work.