The Effect of a Short Rest-Pause on Inspection Efficiency

Little is known about the efficiency of inspectors engaged on simple checking work, or whether short rest-pauses are beneficial to performance at such tasks. An experiment was carried out to investigate these questions in the case of maehino-paced work. The results showed that, when the work was uninterrupted for a period of one hour, efficiency, although high on average, declined markedly after about thirty minutes. When a rest-pause of five minutes was inserted at this point, performance was maintained at its initial level throughout the hour. The theoretical and practical significance of theso findings is discussed.