The Impact of Auditory White Noise on Cognitive Performance

Abstract

Although noise has often been characterized as a distractor, contemporary studies have emphasized how some individuals’ cognitive performance could benefit from task-irrelevant noise. Usually these studies focus on sub-attentive individuals and/or those who have been diagnosed with ADHD. An example of task-irrelevant noise is white noise (WN). Research regarding the effectiveness of WN in healthy adults has provided mixed results and therefore, the implications of WN remain unknown. The objective of this study was to determine the effects of WN on the cognitive performance of the neurotypical population. To test this, participants were asked to complete simultaneous amplitude discrimination and temporal order judgement (TOJ) tests several times in the presence of varying levels of WN. Participants were split into two groups––one containing individuals with regular prior WN exposure and the other with no previous experience with WN. The performances of participants with prior exposure to WN, but not those without prior exposure, resembled a U-shaped tuning curve for simultaneous amplitude discrimination. This indicates that familiarity with WN moderates its effectiveness on cognitive improvement. TOJ was not found to be affected by varying levels of WN intensity. The results of this study emphasized that there is a possibility that WN could facilitate higher levels of cognitive performance, though there is likely an adjustment period associated with its introduction to daily life. This warrants that additional research should be conducted in order to cultivate a definitive conclusion about the effects of WN.