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Apparently VOCs and CO2 in a conventional building will make you half or around 3/4 as smart/performing as you are.

On average, cognitive scores were 61% higher on the Green building day and 101% higher on the two Green+ building days than on the Conventional building day (p < 0.0001). VOCs and CO2 were independently associated with cognitive scores.

These seem like too-good-to-be-true results. I mean it seems you can make your workers twice as "smart" by just doubling the ventilation.

Many local building codes use the previous ASHRAE standard of 20 cfm/person, which corresponds to an indoor CO2 concentration of 945 ppm. Therefore, 20 cfm/person was the ventilation rate we used for the Green and Conventional simulation days because it reflects the minimum required ventilation rate for both green buildings (through LEED®) and conventional buildings (through ASHRAE). We also sought to evaluate the impact of a doubling of that minimum rate to 40 cfm/person (labeled Green+ days), which corresponds to an approximate steady-state CO2 concentration of 550 ppm. To ensure blinding, air movement was maintained at 40 cfm per person on all study days, with 100% outdoor air ventilation used on Green+ days and moderate and high CO2 days, and a mix of 50% outdoor air and 50% recirculated air used on the Green and Conventional days to achieve 20 cfm outdoor air ventilation per person. [...]

But to focus on (or spot check) a less confusing part of the paper that doesn't combine several factors:

On average, a 400-ppm increase in CO2 was associated with a 21% decrease in a typical participant’s cognitive scores across all domains after adjusting for participant (data not shown), a 20-cfm increase in outdoor air per person was associated with an 18% increase in these scores, and a 500-μg/m3 increase in TVOCs was associated with a 13% decrease in these scores.

Have such results been reproduced in other studies by other groups? Does a 400-ppm increase in ambient CO2 result in 21% cognitive decline? I'm skeptical because NIOSH sets the 8-hour exposure to 5,000 ppm CO2. So a 400-ppm increase is not even 10% of that. If the effect is linear, then at the NIOSH limit, a subject would be like 200% "dumber". (The same research group has published similar studies e.g. another claiming "26.4% higher cognitive test scores in high-performing, green certified buildings"; I haven't looked at the details in this other one.)

Fizz
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  • https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/24392/how-does-intelligence-or-general-cognitive-ability-vary-with-level-of-co%e2%82%82/24416#24416 – DavePhD May 20 '21 at 11:15
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    @DavePhD: your answer there seems to involve paper from the same research group though (Satish is also a co-author of the paper I quoted here, and it's published in the same EHP journal). And looking at the comments, [Bryan Krause was also quite skeptical](https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/24392/how-does-intelligence-or-general-cognitive-ability-vary-with-level-of-co%e2%82%82/24416#comment46711_24416) of the Staish papers... – Fizz May 20 '21 at 11:18
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    but do you see the 2019 and 2018 articles that I cite that tend to contradict the earlier articles: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31240239/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29789085/ – DavePhD May 20 '21 at 11:21
  • I explain the 2 contradictory articles more in my answer to this question: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/18390/co%e2%82%82-level-is-high-enough-that-it-reduces-cognitive-ability-isnt-that-a-reason – DavePhD May 20 '21 at 11:23
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    @DavePhD: frankly the papers that find a high degree of correlation between CO2 and performance have one thing in common: SMS battery of tests [designed by Satish](https://www.upstate.edu/psych/research/sms.php). For some reason, in the [2019 paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-019-0071-6) they found little difference in the "standard" tests that ISS astronauts already used (fig .4). – Fizz May 20 '21 at 12:03
  • Apparently SMS was [originally designed](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF03395543) (2006) to find effects of head injuries that were not detectable by other tests. However, it seems few other researchers were impressed enough to adopt it (for that purpose); for whatever reason the 2006 paper has only a handful of citations... One interesting claim from the 2006 paper: "Although the correlation of SMS-generated measures with other tests, including earlier and later WAIS intelligence test formats, are low (.27 or lower), [...]" (continues) – Fizz May 20 '21 at 12:36
  • "predictions of real-world success [e.g., (a) income at age, (b) job level at age - both corrected for industry and location, (c) number of promotions over a fixed time period, (d) number of supervisees as well as (e) 360 degree success ratings (cf. Streufert et aI., 1988; Streufert & Swezey, 1986)] are four times as high as predictions of success via intelligence measures." Also they claim high test-retest reliability for SMS (.92). – Fizz May 20 '21 at 12:40
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    Yeah those "SMS" papers all smell quite fishy to me. Unusual test used only by those authors, the scoring seems a bit opaque, not validated by anyone else, and they seem to come up with magical results far beyond what one would expect from the statistics of these sorts of things (which are highly variable). – Bryan Krause May 20 '21 at 18:47

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