The role of task interference and exposure duration in judging noise annoyance

Definitions of annoyance often include both emotional (`nuisance', `unpleasantness'), and cognitive (`disturbance', `interference') aspects. The main research question in this work is whether ratings of annoyance of sounds given full attention are different to ratings of annoyance of the same sounds when they are in the background while a secondary task is being performed. The task in the current work is a memory task, requiring serial recall of visually-presented digits. Judgements of annoyance are collected first with full attention, and then with low attention, that is, during the task. Other research questions include whether experience of interference of the task affects post-task (i.e. full-attention) unpleasantness judgements, what the influence of exposure duration is, and how to operationalize attention and interference as moderator variables in sound quality evaluation. (Center contract)