AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF SELECTIVE ATTENTION TO COGNITIVE TASK UNDER MEANINGFUL OR MEANINGLESS NOISE

摘要

The presence of external noise during the performance of cognitive tasks involving such as memory, commonly causes a subjective experience of annoyance, which can lead to a decline in performance. This tendency is stronger in response to meaningful noise, such as music and conversation, than for meaningless noise, such as the sound of traffic, and heating ventilating and air-conditioning noise. In designing a comfortable sound environment, it is important to understand the relationship between not only the measurable aspects of external noise, such as the sound pressure level, but also the qualitative aspects, such as the degree of meaningfulness of the external noise, and the subjective experience of annoyance. On the other hand, it is well known that the transient event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by internal or external stimuli in the brain wave are related to the operation of selective attention. This study first focus on the degree of meaningfulness of external noise, then discuss how the ERPs during cognitive tasks under the meaningful noise or meaningless noise. The present experiment was designed to determine the effects of meaningfulness of the external noise on selective attention to the odd-ball paradigm. To this end, we examined differences in the principal components of ERPs. Results were suggested that meaningful noise has a strong influence on selective attention to the cognitive tasks.