White noise enhances new-word learning in healthy adults

Abstract

Research suggests that listening to white noise may improve some aspects of cognitive performance in individuals with lower attention. This study investigated the impact of white noise on new word learning in healthy young adults, and whether this effect was mediated by executive attention skills. Eighty participants completed a single training session to learn the names of twenty novel objects. The session comprised 5 learning phases, each followed by a recall test. A final recognition test was also administered. Half the participants listened to white noise during the learning phases, and half completed the learning in silence. The noise group demonstrated superior recall accuracy over time, which was not impacted by participant attentional capacity. Recognition accuracy was near ceiling for both groups. These findings suggest that white noise has the capacity to enhance lexical acquisition.Stochastic resonance (SR), a phenomenon whereby signal processing is enhanced by the addition of random noise, has been widely demonstrated across various modalities, including visual, auditory, tactile and cross-modal forms of processing 1,2 . Of particular interest are findings that auditory noise has the capacity to enhance some aspects of human cognitive performance, such as the speed of arithmetical computations 3 . Research also suggests that the effects of noise may be mediated by the attentional capacity of participants. For instance, in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), listening to white noise has been shown to improve performance on memory 4 and go/no-go tasks 5 , as well as improve speech recognition thresholds 6 . White noise has also been shown to improve cognitive performance in typically developing school children rated as inattentive by their teachers, and worsen performance in those rated as attentive or highly attentive 7,8 . Such findings may be consistent with the moderate brain arousal (MBA) model 9 , which postulates a link between dopamine function and the effects of white noise on cognitive performance. The model proposes that suboptimal dopamine levels, such as may be found in people with ADHD, can result in reduced levels of neural noise which may impact cognitive performance. In such cases, the provision of a moderate level of white noise can optimize cognitive performance by increasing neural noise via the perceptual system. The model therefore predicts that adding white noise can be beneficial to cognitive performance in those with lower attention, but that the same level of noise may impair performance in those with normal attention where neural noise levels are already optimal.Recent neuroimaging evidence supports the notion that dopamine may underpin the modulatory influence of white noise on cognitive performance. Rausch et al. 10 demonstrated that the provision of white noise during the encoding of scene images resulted in mild improvements to subsequent recognition memory. More importantly, their analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data ...

The impact of musical pleasure and musical hedonia on verbal episodic memory

“…Furthermore, this influence of white noise on cognitive performance has been attributed to dopamine release modulation 88 , 89 . However, in the learning and memory domain, this positive effect has been mainly observed in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) 90 , 91 , while it has been reported from mild to null when tested on healthy people 88 , 92 – 94 . Therefore, although results in relation to white noise must be interpreted with caution, the fact that no significant differences in memory performance have been observed between white noise and low-pleasure conditions discards the hypothesis that white noise could have driven a positive effect in this experiment.…”

Effects of white noise on word recall performance and brain activity in healthy adolescents with normal and low auditory working memory

“…In contradiction to the traditional belief that noise interferes with working memory performance (Schlittmeier et al 2015), recent findings see noise as a beneficial 'tool' that can be used effectively to enhance working memory performance (Abdul Manan et al 2012;Angwin et al 2017;Baijot et al 2016;Pickens et al 2019;Söderlund et al 2010;. However, the underlying neural mechanism of how noise improves AWM performance has not yet been well-established and demands further investigation.…”

“…Most recently, studies of stochastic facilitation have begun crossing disciplinary boundaries into human cognitive functions. Of particular interest are findings that white noise has the capacity to facilitate cognitive performance (Angwin et al 2017;Baijot et al 2016;Söderlund et al 2016).…”

“…Therefore, based on this theoretical assumption, external noise may not be as beneficial for normal individuals as they have an optimal level of neural noise (Sikström and Söderlund 2007). This assumption, however, remains controversial as studies support the notion that noise enhances new word learning and word recall in healthy individuals (Angwin et al 2017;Abdul Manan et al 2012). Most studies of white noise to date have mainly involved clinical populations, and therefore, less is known on its effects on healthy individuals.…”

Effects of white noise in walking on walking time, state anxiety, and fear of falling among the elderly with mild dementia

“…Actually, various studies reported the results from the actions of white noise in the performance of activities (Liu et al, 2007;Söderlund et al, 2010). Also, these actions in learning have been reported (Angwin et al, 2017;Rausch et al, 2014;Vanessa et al, 2014).…”