Effects of background noise on communication in a collaborative team environment

Many command and control operations involve complex collaborative tasks that cannot be successfully completed without effective team communication. However, the ability to communicate efficiently in these tasks is often compromised by environmental factors, such as the presence of ambient noise. In this study, we attempted to quantify the effect that ambient noise might have on the completion of team tasks in an airborne conference room, where there is a severe cost and weight penalty for the noise countermeasures used to achieve each additional decibel of attenuation. Rather than relying on current ambient noise standards, which are based solely on point-to-point word intelligibility, we chose to base our measurement on a collaborative team " communicability" task that required subjects to achieve a consensus on the ordering of four random faces in each of eight labeled columns. Completion time in the task was measured with and without visual line-of-sight in three levels of ambient noise (55dBA, 7OdBA & 80dBA). The results show that completion time in the task increased systematically with the level of the noise, but that visual cues had no significant effect on performance. The results are discussed in terms of their impact on the interpretation of the current standard for ambient noise in communication environments, and in terms of their more general implications for the study of team communication.