Open-plan offices have been popular for their significant advantages such as economical savings and flexible layout design. However, according to several questionnaire studies, noise, and in particular, irrelevant speech has been rated as the major source of annoyance in open-plan offices, which impairs concentration severely and causes productivity decline. As the Irrelevant Sound Effect (ISE) describes, speech and speech-like sounds which possess a changing-state nature significantly affect performance in serial recall tasks. Further studies of this effect have been widely conducted, where participants were commonly asked to perform serial recall tasks under various sound conditions. However, sound stimuli used in these experiments were usually quite simple and could not simulate an acoustical environment close enough to real open-plan offices, making these previous findings questionable. Acoustic factors, such as spatial separation of sound sources and realistic conditions of room acoustics, can further enrich the audio stimuli and increase the realism. In the current study, effects of such factors on auditory distraction were examined within two experiments with the aid of virtual acoustic simulation of a medium-sized open-plan office. Due to the high authenticity and plausibility, headphones were used to reproduce all experimental sound stimuli. Experiment 1 used audio stimuli with and without representative speech and background sounds in monaural and dichotic reproduction. The result showed that speech impairs performance of serial recall tasks significantly, which is consistent with ISE, while the changing-state background sounds and spatial separation of sound sources did not show a clear effect. Experiment 2, which had a limited sample size, provided binaural sounds with four different reverberant conditions. The result did not reveal a significant difference on performances under various reverberant and anechoic conditions. It is then concluded that speech remains an essential factor in acoustic environment for studying ISE, while the separation of sound sources and reverberation conditions are not necessarily needed in experiments with auditory digit recall tasks. However, given the limited sample size in Experiment 2 and the limited realism in the virtual acoustic environments in general, these findings need further investigation in studies with higher authenticity and realism.

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