We examined rule violation behaviour. Student participants (n=44) were asked to always confirm the trial number (the trial number confirmation task) after a perceptual decision task. Half of the students were instructed that omitting the trial number confirmation increased the risk of adding 10 additional trials (the large risk condition), and the other half were instructed that they risked adding one additional trial (the small risk condition). In 4 blocks of all 8 blocks, the trial number message was delayed by 5 seconds in half the trials (the large cost condition), in the other 4 blocks by 2 seconds in half the trials (the small cost condition). Participants could go to the next trial without confirming the delayed message and this behaviour was defined as the violation behaviour. The results indicated that the participants omitted the confirmation of the trial number in the large cost condition, more often than in the small cost condition. This demonstrated the strong effect of task costs in rule violations.

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Workers working in every country usually use words having a meaning of “tiredness” (tukare in Japanese) for expressing their psychological experiences, when they are doing any work activities for long hours or after they finished these activities.
In this paper, the author demonstrated the psychological nature of human tiredness functioning during and after daily life activities of a worker, for the purpose of establishment of a fatigue study method on workers' tiredness.
First, the psychological structure of human daily life activities was argued on the basis of the activity theory that had been put forward by Russian psychologist A. N. Leontief.
According to the argument, human tiredness was psychologically defined as a cognitive phenomenon essentially relating with deterioration of motivation to do daily life activities. It was revealed to have psychological characteristics which are exhibited in operating together with psychological phenomena such as drive, need, emotion, memory and expectancy.
Lastly, the significance of long-term surveys on workers' tiredness for studying their prolonged fatigue was discussed. These surveys can make it possible for surveyed workers to know daily variations in their tiredness during and after their daily life activities including work activities. As a result, the workers may recognize and evaluate their prolonged fatigue conditions definitely.

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The aim of this study is to develop design guidelines about how to plan offices where workers can concentrate on work or meetings under distracting conversation noise from other workers, without disturbing mutual communication and information sharing. The results of subjective evaluation during the experiments concerning the effects of conversation noise suggest that “steady meaningless masking noise” is effective for improving concentration on work and reducing distraction levels by other persons' speech voice for personal work. “Screening” of noise by means of partitions is effective to improve concentration and the comfort level of the work environment for conversation.

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