Effect of auditory noise circumstance on visual images encoding based electroencephalography analysis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Auditory stimulation may be beneficial or detrimental to human cognitive and memory processing. Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the influence of various sounds on human performance. The current research discovers the impact of auditory white noise on the memory performance of 60 college students using different difficulty levels in visual object-number pair assessment. Memory perfomance is accessed based on the assessment recall scores and brain activities. An electroencephalography (EEG) device measures and records the brain's electrical activity during the experimental session. Nine EEG channel locations are selected for brain activities analysis. The raw EEG dataset is processed using wavelet methods of stationary wavelet transform (SWT) and discrete wavelet transfrom (DWT) using the Daubechies (db) function to eliminate the artifact components and extract the required EEG features. The result indicated that the college student remembered the object-number pair assessment better under auditory white noise rather than no audio condition. This contributed from the activation of alpha, theta, gamma, and beta activities that increased the subject's attention, alertness, and sensory processing during memorizing. Therefore, it is suggested that the auditory white noise should be listened to during remembering and learning visual items, which can boost memory performance.