The paper reviews research on the effects of noise on attention. An experimental study of noise and selective attention is then described. The results showed that noise has different effects on tasks requiring focused attention and categoric search, with noise impairing performance on the focused attention task and having little effect on the search task. This effect of noise did not interact with time of day, level of anxiety, or cognitive failure. Noise did not influence the size of the Eriksen effect, although this did change at different times of day. Neither noise nor any of the other factors had a significant effect on the place repetition effect.