Is Working Standing up Better? A Comparative Analysis of Work Posture on Sustained Attention.

Poster Session A - Saturday, April 13, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Julia Cardarelli¹ (juliac4@hawaii.edu), Jonas Vibell¹; ¹University of Hawaii at Manoa

With work from home opportunities becoming increasingly popular, the transition potentially spurred the opportunity to make the couch, or even bed a workstation. Moreover, traditional office work means remaining seated, many hours a day for millions of people. It’s natural to wonder if this is actually the best posture for optimal work performance. Previous literature has evaluated the significance of posture on performance using paradigms such as the Stroop task, visual search, and task switching. Inconclusive results raise the rationale to re-test the hypothesis using a different paradigm, the Sustained Attention to Response Task. Three posture conditions, lying supine, sitting upright, and standing were measured within-subjects, and counterbalanced between-subjects. 70 participants completed testing, 60 were analyzed; data acquisition error, failure to comply with procedures, and technical difficulties accounted for 10 subjects being removed from analysis. A repeated-measures ANOVA and confirmatory paired samples t-tests were implemented to investigate the correlation between posture and participant performance in both accuracy and speed. The repeated-measures ANOVA produced significant results of go-trial RT between supine-standing and sitting-standing posture conditions. Additionally, there were significant differences in omission errors between the supine-sitting posture. There were no significant results between commission errors and posture conditions. Our findings suggest that focus is altered depending upon posture and that standing is predominantly leading to an increased workload with less error caused by mindlessness.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Other