Background noise poses a significant challenge in daily conversations, impacting short-term memory and listening effort. Existing studies often lack a realistic comparison between different types of background noise, particularly between intelligible and unintelligible noise. In German-speaking contexts, intelligible noise typically refers to recognizable German speech, while unintelligible noise includes traffic sounds, foreign languages, or non-semantic sounds. Listening effort, defined as the deliberate allocation of mental resources to overcome obstacles in achieving listening goals, serves as a measure reflecting the cognitive load affecting short-term memory. This study investigates the effects of intelligible and unintelligible background noise on short-term memory and listening effort. A dual-task paradigm was employed, with the Heard-Text Recall (HTR) task as the primary task to assess memory performance and a vibrotactile recognition task as the secondary task to measure listening effort. Results showed that background noise significantly increased listening effort and decreased short[1]term memory performance compared to silent conditions. However, no significant differences were observed between intelligible and unintelligible noise regarding their impact on listening effort or memory performance. This may be attributed to the limited sample size.

Melden Sie sich hier an um Einladungen zu den Kolloquium-Vorträgen per E-Mail zu erhalten.
Register here to receive the invitations to colloquium talks via e-mail.

Zoom-Meeting-ID: 954 4073 3814
Passwort: 450783