Does Noise Sensitivity Decrease Auditory Task Performance and Person-Reliability? [Vortrag]
- Noise sensitivity is a widely used, yet inconsistently defined, concept of being disturbed by environmental noise, independent of loudness levels. The origins of noise sensitivity are mostly unclear, but it has a higher prevalence among people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism, and could be caused by increased neural excitation due to sound, resulting in increased cognitive load. In this case, noise sensitivity can be expected to decrease people’s mental performance in both auditory and non-auditory tasks. The former was tested in an experiment using a dual-task paradigm where participants had to solve a visual task in the presence of environmental sounds and afterwards had to recall which sounds they perceived and to evaluate the overall soundscape pleasantness and loudness. Preliminary results indicate that participants’ noise sensitivity is positively correlated with the experienced cognitive load as well as with loudness and unpleasantness judgments. Also,Noise sensitivity is a widely used, yet inconsistently defined, concept of being disturbed by environmental noise, independent of loudness levels. The origins of noise sensitivity are mostly unclear, but it has a higher prevalence among people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism, and could be caused by increased neural excitation due to sound, resulting in increased cognitive load. In this case, noise sensitivity can be expected to decrease people’s mental performance in both auditory and non-auditory tasks. The former was tested in an experiment using a dual-task paradigm where participants had to solve a visual task in the presence of environmental sounds and afterwards had to recall which sounds they perceived and to evaluate the overall soundscape pleasantness and loudness. Preliminary results indicate that participants’ noise sensitivity is positively correlated with the experienced cognitive load as well as with loudness and unpleasantness judgments. Also, noise sensitivity was negatively associated with the performance in the recall task and the test-retest-reliability of their judgments. These findings support the idea that noise sensitivity is a consequence of difficulties in filtering irrelevant auditory information.…


| Author: | Markus von Berg, Hendrik Himmelin, Jochen Steffens |
|---|---|
| Institutes: | Institute of Sound and Vibration Engineering (ISAVE) |
| Fachbereich/Einrichtung: | Hochschule Düsseldorf / Fachbereich - Medien |
| Document Type: | Conference Proceeding |
| Year of Completion: | 2024 |
| Language of Publication: | English |
| Publisher: | Deutsche Gesellschaft für Akustik e.V. |
| Place of publication: | Berlin |
| Parent Title (English): | Fortschritte der Akustik - DAGA 2024, 18. - 21. März 2024, Hannover |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 0 Informatik, Informationswissenschaft, allgemeine Werke / 00 Informatik, Wissen, Systeme / 000 Informatik, Informationswissenschaft, allgemeine Werke |
| Licence (German): | |
| Release Date: | 2025/05/22 |