Importance of intellectual work in the office has been increasing recently and improvement of the intellectual productivity leads great benefits of economic activities. A lot of researchers therefore have been studied the intellectual productivity, and it was revealed that office environment affects the intellectual productivity. Although conventional studies have investigated the relationship between office environment and intellectual productivity, they have not considered the influence of dynamic change of environment nor temporary stimuli. On the other hand, it has been reported that the temporary strong airflow could arouse office workers when they felt sleepy and it recovered their intellectual productivity. Focusing on this arousal effect of strong airflow in this study, the relationship between the temporary stimulus of airflow and the intellectual productivity has been examined.
First, in order to investigate what kind of airflow was appropriate as a stimulus, eight participants were exposed various airflows. As the result of their subjective evaluation, two candidates of airflows were determined.
Second, another experiment was conducted to evaluate these two airflow candidates. While performing a cognitive task in the experiment, physiological indices such as EEG (electroencephalogram), ECG (electrocardiogram), SPR (skin potential response) and PERCLOS (percent of eyelid closure over pupil) of participants were measured. And when their arousal level declined during the task, the candidates of airflow were given as a stimulus. As the result of six participants, 26 of airflow stimuli were given in total and the physiological indices were obtained. It was found that 8 out of 26 stimuli recovered their arousal level however their intellectual productivity could not recover. It was also found that 15 out of 26 airflow stimuli could recover both arousal level and intellectual productivity when examining its effect just after 15 second term of airflow (p＜0.05).
In the future, development of an airflow stimulus which sustains recovery effect for long time is required to improve intellectual productivity.