title: Psychology of the scientist: XLI. continuous noise can degrade performance when using badly designed equipment: a case history.
abstract: An acclaimed important discovery was made in the early 1950s that noise degrades the performance of certain manual tasks directly, by a mechanism other than the masking of sounds. It now appears that this is not so. The unravelling of the mystery is described, together with some of the repercussions and implications.
mesh_terms: D001143:Arousal; D003463:Cues; D004864:Equipment and Supplies; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects*; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011584:Psychology; D012586:Science / Q000266:history*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis