The cognitive effects of noise on the memory performance of children with cochlear implants

Concentrating to perform cognitive tasks in a noisy environment requires to re-allocate mental resources to overcome the interference of noise. This process and the resulting fatigue, i.e., cognitive effort, can be detrimental to hearing children’s cognitive performance and ultimately to their learning. However, we know little of how background noise affects the cognitive performance of children with hearing loss. In a pilot trial, we addressed this research question. Eight cochlear implanted (CI) children and 5 age-matched normally hearing children (NH) (7-12 years) carried out an auditory attention task and a digit span task in quiet and babble noise. Behavioral (accuracy), self-report, and psychophysiological (pupil dilation) measures were used to assess children’s cognitive performance and cognitive effort. CI children performed worse than NH children in both acoustic conditions. However, no significant effects of acoustic condition (quiet/noise) were observed. Although CI children efficiently compensated for noise in performing the cognitive tasks, their pupil dilation revealed greater cognitive effort in noise than in quiet.