Abstract
The effect of non-informational speech spectrum noise as a distractor on cognitive and listening comprehension ability was examined in fifty-three young, normal hearing adults. Time-controlled tasks were used to measure auditory working memory (WM) capacity and attention switching (AS) ability. Listening comprehension was measured using a lecture, interview, and spoken narratives test. Noise level was individually set to achieve at least 90% or higher speech intelligibility. Participants’ listening comprehension in the presence of distracting noise was better on inference questions compared to listening in quiet. Their speed of information processing was also significantly faster in WM and AS tasks in noise. These results were consistent with the view that noise may enhance arousal levels leading to faster information processing during cognitive tasks. Whereas the speed of AS was faster in noise, this rapid switching of attention resulted in more errors in updating items. Participants who processed information faster in noise and did so accurately, more effectively switched their attention to refresh/rehearse recall items within WM. More efficient processing deployed in the presence of noise appeared to have led to improvements in WM performance and making inferences in a listening comprehension task. Additional research is required to examine these findings using background noise that can cause informational masking.
Highlights
Cognitive Hearing Science Lab, Communicative Disorders & Deaf Education, Utah State University, Citation: Nagaraj, N.K
While the participants’ attention switching (AS) and updating were faster in noise, their accuracy of retrieving the updated counts from working memory (WM) during recall was significantly poorer in noise than in quiet
In the presence of noise, speed of information processing was significantly faster for both AS and WM tasks
Summary
Cognitive Hearing Science Lab, Communicative Disorders & Deaf Education, Utah State University, Citation: Nagaraj, N.K. Participants’ listening comprehension in the presence of distracting noise was better on inference questions compared to listening in quiet Their speed of information processing was significantly faster in WM and AS tasks in noise. Considerable evidence supports that background noise/sounds have a detrimental effect on cognitive task performance, such as verbal short-term memory and reading comprehension [1,2,3,4]. Semantic information in irrelevant sound can significantly disrupt language-based tasks, such as reading comprehension [3,4,15], reasoning [16], and writing [17] This effect of ISE is known as semantic interference or informational masking in the speech perception literature. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
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