March 7, 2008
From MyWiki
Present: Shayla Nix, Sergio Carr, Jessica Walters, Jessica Hernandez, Kristin Theimer
Today we our group met during the normal class hour. Dr. Marrs was gone so we met in the classroom. Everyone completed their research summaries but some were unable to upload their papers. Those who were unable to upload their summaries to Dr. Marrs' website took an alternative route and emailed the summaries to Dr. Marrs' personal email account. We each discussed; what our summaries were about, if we had any troubles finding the articles, and if we felt like we are going down the right path for a successful project. We all seemed to have difficulties finding the articles that related to our theme. But believe that we can find more articles using different sources. After a discussion on how our project was coming along, we went around the group and each talked about the most interesting article we found.
Sergio's most interesting research article dealt with the cocktail party affect. This article talked about an experiment performed; were a person wearing headphones was listening to two sets of talking in each ear. The participant was suppose to reject one of the people talking and to retain as much information about the other speaker as possible. In order to do this, the participant had to block out one side of the headphones. During this experiment, the noises coming from the headphones would switch languages, people, and accents. Interestingly enough, the participants usually didn't realize that the voices had switched. The conclusion was that the participants found it fairly easy to block off the unwanted voice in order to retain the information from the other voice. This was a good example of streaming, which allows people to choose what we want to hear when breaking apart a conversation.
Jessica H. found an article dealing with back ground music. This experiment computed high arousal levels and low arousal levels in music. The participants were to perform five cognitive tests while listening to different music with different arousal levels. The conclusion was; the harder the test and the higher arousal of music, the scores of the cognitive test went down. The lower arousal sounds and the easier the cognitive tests, the results were average or above average. The article made it clear that different cultures score differently because of the different views.
Kristen's article was on light. The different effects that brightness and color contrasts have on our ability to perform tasks. Brighter colors are the most distracting. When black lettering is used people find it easier to concentrate rather than lettering of bright and florescent colors. They found that bright colors attract more people.
Jessica W. found her article which links Dementia and Alzheimer's disease with a higher likely hood of being distracted by sudden movements. She found that people with these diseases are more likely to learn new things when in a plain environment. If they are put into an environment with lots of sudden movements, the patients become distracted and some become afraid.
Shayla found an article that dealt with annoying sounds at work. This article talked about people working at a job with cubical desks. It found that these people are more easily distracted. These distractions come from other workers chatting with each other, chatting on the phones, workers typing on the computers, the sounds of the air conditioners/heaters kicking on and off. All of these annoying sounds are found to not only be distracting but cause stress. The stress is caused because the person is concentrating on their work when they become distracted and it takes them a long time to get back to work or back to concentrating on what they need to get done. When they are unable to get back to work, they begin stressing over the consequences. Tests show that annoying sounds cause stress and makes people unable to concentrate on their daily tasks.
Notes taken by: Shayla
