Investigating the influence of babble on short-term memory performance.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 165
Description: Previous research has shown that the presence of a background noise can adversely affect memory for spoken words, and that young adults listening to words in noise often show the same kind of memory deficits as older adults listening in quiet. This suggests that part of the memory difficulties experienced by older adults could result from auditory processing deficits.The effects of different kinds of masking and distortion appear to be similar in both younger and older adults. However, age-related sensory deficits appear to exacerbate these effects in older adults, making their memory more vulnerable in adverse listening conditions.In particular, this thesis investigated two possible ways in which background babble (several people talking simultaneously) may adversely affect memory performance. The babble could mask the stimulus and degrade the perceptual representation of words to such an extent that it compromises their subsequent processing. Or, the top-down processes needed to extract the words from the babble may deplete resources that otherwise would be used for encoding. Employing an auditory paired-associate memory paradigm and using a variety of techniques, this thesis investigates the underlying mechanisms by which babble affects speech recognition and memory in younger and older adults. The results of the first part of the study show that temporally distorting words in quiet had much less of an effect on memory than presenting undistorted words in babble for both age groups, even when the two situations produced identical word recognition scores. Subsequent experiments show that a continuous babble background affects memory performance because the top-down processes required to extract the words from the babble interfere with their encoding. In the study's second part we attempted to define exactly at what level of the processing hierarchy, the presence of babble or distortion in the stimulus interferes with memory encoding. We propose that the presence of babble requires additional linguistic and/or semantic processing of the words in auditory memory, and that it is the specific kind of processing that interferes with the encoding of the words.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-10, Section: B, page: 5716.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.