Quantitative evaluation using EEG for influence of meaningful or meaningless noise on participants during mental tasks

The presence of noise during the performance of cognitive tasks involving memory, commonly causes a subjective experience of annoyance, which can lead to a decline in performance. This tendency is stronger for meaningful noise such as music and conversation than for meaningless noise such as road traffic noise. This paper describes the psychophysiological effects of meaningful noise. Specifically, we first focus on the degree of meaningfulness of noise, then discuss how the brain responds during auditory cognitive tasks. Transient event-related potentials (ERPs), elicited by internal or external stimuli, can be measured using electroencephalography (EEG). P300 ERPs are related to the operation of selective attention. The present experiment was designed to determine the effects of meaningfulness of the noise on a odd-ball paradigm. To this end, we examined differences in the P300 ERPs of these components. In addition, we considered the psychological impression of annoyance in response to the noise, and a performance, such as reaction time. Our results suggested that meaningful noise has a strong influence on selective attention to stimuli in auditory cognitive tasks.