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

The goal of the 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.