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

AbstractBackground: Background noise has been found to negatively affect working memory. Numerous stud-ies 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 bebeneﬁcial to investigate working memory functions in adverse listening conditions early in the agingprocess (i.e., middle-age), when hearing function is relatively unaffected.Purpose:Thefocusofthisstudywastodeterminetheinﬂuenceofbackgroundbabbleonworkingmem-ory in YA and middle-aged adults (MA) with normal hearing.Research Design: Before testing was begun, we established that all participants could correctly identifywords in a degraded experimental testing environment with 100% accuracy. Then, the participants lis-tenedtolistscomposedofﬁvepairsofwordsinquietandin20-talkerbabble.Aftertheﬁnalwordpair,theparticipants were cued with the ﬁrst word of one of the previous ﬁve word pairs. The participants wererequired to write down the second word of the pair. The percent correct scores for each of the ﬁve serialpositions were analyzed comparing the two listening conditions for YA and MA. Ten YA and ten MA withnormalhearingbetween250–8000Hzandascoreofatleast26/30ontheMini-MentalStateExaminationparticipatedinthestudy.Asdifferentcognitiveprocessesareusedforinitial,middle,andﬁnalserialposi-tions, averaged scores were obtained for Positions 2 and 3 and for Positions 4 and 5. Subsequently,repeated-measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were conducted on mean scores of correctlyrecalled word pairs with serial positions (initial, middle, and ﬁnal) and listening condition (quiet, babble)asthewithin-participantvariablesandagegroup(YA,MA)asthebetween-participantindependentvariable.This OMNIBUS repeated-measures ANOVA was then followed up with separate repeated-measuresANOVAS for the initial, middle, and ﬁnal positions.Results:Correctrecallscoreswerelowerforearlypositionscomparedwiththelatterpositions,irrespec-tive of listening condition. For Position 1, YA—but not MA—performed signiﬁcantly better in babble thaninquiet.Forthemiddlepositions(Positions2and3),MAperformedsigniﬁcantlymorepoorlythantheYAirrespectiveoflisteningcondition.Fortheﬁnalpositions(Positions4and5),noagedifferencesoreffectsof listening condition were found.Conclusions: The results indicate that both YA and MA have trouble recalling earlier pieces of infor-mationinquietand inbabble.However,MAexhibited signiﬁcantlypoorer recallscoresthanYA inbabbleforPosition1,whichsuggestthatcognitiveprocessesrelatedtomemoryencodingandretrievalarediffer-ent in background babble for MA and YA.Key Words: Cognition, working memory, middle-aged, noise/adverse effects, aging/psychology, taskperformance and analysisAbbreviations:ANOVA5analysisofvariance;MA5middle-agedadults;SBR5signal-to-babbleratio;YA 5 young adults*Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ; †Columbia University, New York, NYMichelle T. Neidleman, 354 Conklintown Road, Ringwood, NJ 07456; Phone: 973-747-2891; E-mail: MNeidleman@gmail.comJ Am Acad Audiol 26:220–228 (2015)