Spicciarelli Gaia, Gheller Flavia, Celli Michael, Arfé Barbara
Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, University of Padova, Padua, Italy.
I-APPROVE Centre, University of Padova, Padua, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2025 May 26;16:1565112. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1565112. eCollection 2025.
Classroom noise, particularly speech noise from students, appears to disrupt verbal working memory processes essential for learning tasks such as reading and writing. Such negative interference has been alternatively explained as either the effect of phonological intrusion from speech noise into the phonological loop processes of working memory or the diversion of general attentional resources away from working memory processes. These effects have been studied primarily in relation to intelligible speech, while the impact of unintelligible speech, such as multitalker babble-a common source of noise in schools-has received less attention. The present study aimed to examine the effects of unintelligible multitalker babble noise on the performance of 38 students aged 8 to 10 years in low (Digit Span) and high demanding (Reading Span) verbal working memory tasks. We examined whether the effects of multitalker babble noise differed based on children's age and their visual attentional resources. Verbal working memory and visual attentional skills were assessed in quiet and multitalker babble noise across three age groups: 8, 9, and 10 years. Our findings revealed that multitalker babble noise disrupts significantly verbal working memory performance in complex verbal working memory tasks, like the Reading Span task, but has minimal impact on low demanding tasks, like Digit Span Forward and Backward. Although children's visual attentional skills significantly contributed to their verbal working memory performance, they alone cannot explain the negative effect of multitalker babble noise. Interestingly, although children's behavioral performance did not significantly differ across acoustic conditions for most tasks, they reported higher cognitive effort in noisy environments. This highlights a discrepancy between perceived effort and actual performance, emphasizing the importance of integrating multiple measures to assess the impact of noise on cognitive processes.
课堂噪音，尤其是学生的言语噪音，似乎会干扰对阅读和写作等学习任务至关重要的言语工作记忆过程。这种负面干扰可以解释为言语噪音对工作记忆语音回路过程的语音侵入效应，或者是一般注意力资源从工作记忆过程中转移。这些效应主要是针对可理解的言语进行研究的，而诸如多人交谈的嘈杂声（学校中常见的噪音源）等不可理解言语的影响则较少受到关注。本研究旨在考察不可理解的多人交谈嘈杂声对38名8至10岁学生在低要求（数字广度）和高要求（阅读广度）言语工作记忆任务中的表现的影响。我们研究了多人交谈嘈杂声的影响是否因儿童年龄及其视觉注意力资源而异。在安静和多人交谈嘈杂声环境中，对8岁、9岁和10岁三个年龄组的言语工作记忆和视觉注意力技能进行了评估。我们的研究结果表明，多人交谈嘈杂声会显著干扰复杂言语工作记忆任务（如阅读广度任务）中的言语工作记忆表现，但对低要求任务（如顺背和倒背数字广度）的影响最小。虽然儿童的视觉注意力技能对其言语工作记忆表现有显著贡献，但仅凭这些技能无法解释多人交谈嘈杂声的负面影响。有趣的是，尽管在大多数任务中，儿童在不同声学条件下的行为表现没有显著差异，但他们报告在嘈杂环境中的认知努力更高。这凸显了感知努力与实际表现之间的差异，强调了整合多种测量方法以评估噪音对认知过程影响的重要性。
