Paper published in Building and Environment
The Coronavirus pandemic reshapes occupants’ life since the lockdown of the city for decreasing the virus spread. In order to decrease the spread of COVID-19, people need to practice social distancing, avoid crowds, and stay at home, which increases occupants much more time in the indoor environment. Though this may be necessary to keep us away from being affected by the pandemic, staying indoors has many health implications – mentally and physically, which impair cognition performance. Few previous studies have commonly examined the effects of IEQ on specific cognitive skills.
We want to know the effect of IEQ on occupants in the indoor environment.
What about the influence on cognition? And how do those affect our working and/or learning performance?
To address this concern, we examined the effects of IEQ on cognition that are documented in a broad range of laboratory and field studies to better understand the relationship between specific IEQ factors and different cognition. We conducted a detailed manual review to illustrate how IEQ affects occupants’ cognition which is vital to work and/or learning performance.
We conducted a detailed manual review of 66 focused studies. Figure 1 shows the summary categories of IEQ and cognitive functions. IEQ was decomposed into five major categories, i.e., indoor air quality, thermal environment, noise, lighting, and non-light visual factors. Cognitions are also divided into five categories—attention, perception, memory, language function, and higher order cognitive skills. We have examined the effects of IEQ on cognition that are documented in a broad range of laboratory and field studies to better understand the relationship between specific IEQ factor and different cognition. Overall, results show that poor IEQ conditions are but not always associated with reduced cognition. The effects of a specific IEQ factor on different cognitive functions are quite distinct.
We also provide a more profound explanation of the quantitative results, we also adopted co-occurrence analysis to generate landscapes of the associations between IEQ and cognition factors by analyzing keywords and abstracts of 8,133 studies. The number of publications and knowledge landscapes obtained from keyword co-occurrence analysis at different periods. The keyword co-occurrence analysis identified more IEQ factors and cognitive functions emerging in the recent literature years. It can assist in literature reviews in retrieving information from large-scale data to understand the complex network of IEQ and cognitive functions. The findings suggest an exponential growth of studies and emerging topics related to the association between IEQ factors and cognitive functions.
For more details on the paper:
Wang, Chao, Fan Zhang, Julian Wang, James K. Doyle, Peter A. Hancock, Cheuk Ming Mak, and Shichao Liu. “How indoor environmental quality affects occupants’ cognitive functions: A systematic review.” Building and Environment (2021): 107647.
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