Abstract
The relationship between noise and human performance is a crucial topic in ergonomic research. However, the brain dynamics of the emotional arousal effects of background noises are still unclear. The current study employed meaningless speech noises in the n-back working memory task to explore the changes of event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by the noises with low arousal level vs. high arousal level. We found that the memory performance in low arousal condition were improved compared with the silent and the high arousal conditions; participants responded more quickly and had larger P2 and P3 amplitudes in low arousal condition while the performance and ERP components showed no significant difference between high arousal and silent conditions. These findings suggested that the emotional arousal dimension of background noises had a significant influence on human working memory performance, and that this effect was independent of the acoustic characteristics of noises (e.g., intensity) and the meaning of speech materials. The current findings improve our understanding of background noise effects on human performance and lay the ground for the investigation of patients with attention deficits.
Highlights
Background noise usually interferes with cognitive processing and has detrimental effects on mental and physical health [1,2]
The present study aimed to investigate the event-related potentials (ERPs) correlates of the effects of arousal-dependent speech noise on working memory
A repeated-measures 263 ANOVA was performed with memory load and arousal level as the two within-subjects factors, and with accuracy rate (ACC) as the dependent variable
Summary
Background noise usually interferes with cognitive processing and has detrimental effects on mental and physical health [1,2]. A vast amount of effort has been devoted to investigating the noise effect on human performances, such as attention and memory [3,4,5]. Using event-related potential (ERP) technology, researchers found that the latency of the P3 component was delayed during white noise presentation when compared with silent condition in an oddball paradigm [6,7]. In a visual-spatial attention task, Trimmel and Poelzl [8] found the reaction time (RT) was prolonged and the DC-potential shifted towards positivity in a noise condition compared to a silent condition. One of the cognitive mechanisms that possibly underpin noise effects on human performance is working memory degradation [9]. Background noise would disrupt material held in the phonological loop of working memory [11]
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