Noise characteristics and their impact on working memory and listening comprehension performance

An emerging body of literature is demonstrating a significant relationship between cognition and listening performance. Noise has been shown to be detrimental to maintaining focus of attention in cognitive tasks. Noise characteristics, for a given SNR, may have differing impacts on these tasks. Fourteen normal-hearing individuals participated in an experiment designed to examine the effects of different background noises on auditory cognitive tasks while still maintaining a high-level of intelligibility (90%). Three tasks were used: a working memory span task, an attention-switching task, and a language comprehension task. The first two tasks were completed in quiet and three different types of modulated background noise, and the language comprehension task was performed in quiet and one modulated noise. Performance in both the working memory span task and attention- switching task were correlated significantly with language comprehension, suggesting that the cognitive resources tapped by these tasks are similar to those required for a complex activity such as comprehending language. Also, all three noise types had a significant effect on performance, which supports the notion that the noises used in the experiment imposed an increase in cognitive load which may impair an individual’s ability to thrive in these situations.