The effect of background babble on working memory in young and middle-aged adults

Journal of the American Academy of Audiology
Michelle T NeidlemanJanet Koehnke

Abstract

Background noise has been found to negatively affect working memory. Numerous studies have also found that older adults perform more poorly on working memory tasks than young adults (YA). Hearing status has often been a confounding factor in older individuals. Therefore, it would be beneficial to investigate working memory functions in adverse listening conditions early in the aging process (i.e., middle-age), when hearing function is relatively unaffected. The focus of this study was to determine the influence of background babble on working memory in YA and middle-aged adults (MA) with normal hearing. Before testing was begun, we established that all participants could correctly identify words in a degraded experimental testing environment with 100% accuracy. Then, the participants listened to lists composed of five pairs of words in quiet and in 20-talker babble. After the final word pair, the participants were cued with the first word of one of the previous five word pairs. The participants were required to write down the second word of the pair. The percent correct scores for each of the five serial positions were analyzed comparing the two listening conditions for YA and MA. Ten YA and ten MA with normal hearing between 2...Continue Reading

Citations

Sep 19, 2015·Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR·Nicole MarroneJames Shehorn
Apr 8, 2017·Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR·Mary AltNelson Cowan
Feb 16, 2021·Journal of the American Academy of Audiology·Jung-Sun HwangJae Hee Lee

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