Affiliation:
1. Dept. of Psychology, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia 6150.
Abstract
The acute effects of exposure to extreme stress are often hypothesised to be at least partly responsible for errors of judgement and action in humans. Most research in this area has concentrated on simple laboratory tasks. This paper reports the results of research that examined the effects on troubleshooting performance of three variables known to influence psychological arousal: noise, memory load and time of day. All three independent variables were found to affect troubleshooting performance. Noise facilitated performance of subjects with low initial ability and all subjects at night in a low memory load condition. However, the performance of high ability subjects was impaired in the morning when exposed to bursts of noise. The theoretical and practical implications of these results for future research and systems design are discussed.