October 7, 2022. 12:00h. On-site session. Language: English.

How noise affect cognitive performances of children with additional learning needs: a preliminary study

Gaia Spicciarelli

University of Padua (Italy)

Several studies show that noise exposition, whether chronic or acute, has a detrimental effect on children’s performance at tasks like reading comprehension or writing. It is still unclear which are the effects of verbal background noise on children’s cognitive performance.

The goal of the present study is to investigate how background noise can affect children’s cognitive performance, and whether it affects in similar way the cognitive performance of children without and with additional learning need, like a learning disability (LD) or an attentional deficit disorder (ADHD).

Two visual attentional tasks, an inhibition task and a verbal WM task have been administered by a serious game App (“Cognitive Effort in Noise” – CoEN) to 62 typically developing children and to 17 children with a diagnosis of LD or ADHD, between 7 and 12 years of age. All tasks have been performed in both quiet and noise (multitalker babble at 60dB through headphones). The data analysis revealed a detrimental effect of noise on children’s WM performance in both groups. However, noise had also a positive influence on the attentional performance of children with additional needs.

These preliminary results, if confirmed, may have a great relevance for classroom acoustic interventions.

Bio

Gaia Spicciarelli is a developmental psychologist. She is currently a PhD student of the Brain, Mind and Computer Science (BMCS) of the University of Padua (Italy) under the supervision of prof. Barbara Arfé, PhD.