Selective Attention Compensates Detrimental Effect of Auditory Noise on Performance in Posner Experiment

Abstract

Environmental noise has a degrading effect on individual’s capacity to pay attention. In this paper, we revealed that the individual’s impaired performance under noise can be counterpoised by recollecting and recalling his attention. We studied the effect of auditory white noise on individual’s performance in Posner experiment; and examined if actively reorienting the individual’s attention to stimuli would mitigate the effects of auditory noise. Our subjects, ten undergraduate students, participated in the classical Posner experiment, while auditory white noise was being played for them through earphone. We varied the intensity of the auditory noise and studied subject’s performance in three conditions: neutral, valid cued, and invalid cued trials. Our results showed that the presence of auditory noise degraded subject’s performance in neutral trials. However, subject’s performance was not affected by auditory noise in valid cued trials.