Republic of the Philippines

Bicol University
College of Social Science and Philosophy
Department of Psychology
Daraga, Albay

Tiffany M. Balde
BS Psychology 2B
Psyc 06 - Experimental Psychology

Effects of Noise Concentration

Sylverr Alexandra D. Bailon ; Feliza Nadezhda B. Buera ; Danielle A. Llarena

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have shown negative effects of noise on cognitive performance. However,

these effects on memory have been less examined. This study was set out to investigate to find out

how noise affects a student's ability to concentrate. The experiment involved thirty (30) second-

year students from Block B of the Bachelor of Science in Psychology program at Bicol University

- Daraga Campus, who were randomly separated into two groups (experimental and control), each

having 15 students. The purpose of this experiment is to find out if there is a substantial effect on

students' concentration when taking a test in a noisy environment." The data analysis from the data

collection process is shown in this section, along with the interpretation of the t-test for

Independent Measures.” Results showed that because the variance in the groups is homogeneous,

the t-value and p-value can be safely interpreted. At a p-value of.081, which is greater than the

significance level of 0.05, there is no significant difference between the means of the two groups.

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 Republic of the Philippines
Bicol University
College of Social Science and Philosophy
Department of Psychology
Daraga, Albay

INTRODUCTION

Distractions occur in a variety of forms, shapes, and sounds. External distractions include

general noise, other people's discussions, television or movies, music, phone notifications, app

alerts, and anything else that diverts your focus away from the activity at hand. It has long been

recognized that conflicting ambient stimulus that distracts attention from work can easily disrupt

cognitive processing. This effect is thought to be caused by competition for attentional resources

between distracting and target stimuli. Negative distractor effects are observed across a wide range

of tasks and stimuli, as well as across diverse participant populations. The consequences are

expected to be very substantial for some populations. We can't just turn our minds off or put them

in a drawer, so they don't bother us, as much as we'd like to. And each time we are distracted, it

takes valuable energy that we could be utilizing to study, memorize, and master knowledge to

refocus and return to our task. A clear understanding of the physical environment in which we

operate is crucial to our activities in such environment. Environment is the totality of the places

and surroundings, in which we live, work and interact with other people in our cultural, religious,

political and socio-economic activities for self-fulfilment and advancement of our communities,

societies or nations (Hodgson, 2002).

Noise can be best described as a sound that is, unwanted, annoying, with a fluctuating

loudness and intensity level that can disturb ones hearing (Elert, 2016). In today's modern world,

humans consume a huge load of various noises in their environmental or occupational settings.

Much of these unwanted noises get filtered out by our brains and remains rather unnoticeable. But

some of these noises cannot be habituated unconsciously depending on our personal differences

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 Republic of the Philippines
Bicol University
College of Social Science and Philosophy
Department of Psychology
Daraga, Albay

(Basner, Müller, & Elmenhorst, 2011). Once, a noise reaches a certain level of intensity, it can no

longer remain unattended and begins to affect the task we might be involved in or simply just cause

annoyance for us. If the exposure to noise exceeds certain levels and become chronic, it could lead

to some serious health effects such as hearing loss or cognitive impairments (Stansfeld, Haines, &

Brown, 2000).

Memory studies frequently examined the influence of noise, which is a constant,

unchanging sound that is usually produced electrically. The impacts of various types of music,

meaningful conversation, nonsensical syllables, multi-talker babbling, television background

noise, office background noise, and background noise from airports, traffic, and trains were also

investigated. The amount and frequency of white noise produced varied depending on the

investigation. Most of the research included control groups that were not subjected to noise. The

impact of noise on human cognitive performance and brain activity has frequently been overlooked

(Basner 2014). Noise has a variety of detrimental impacts, ranging from interfering with cognitive

functioning to negatively impacting mental and physical health (Stansfeld 2002). Noise exposure

has non-auditory impacts such as perceived disruption, annoyance, cognitive impairment,

cardiovascular diseases, and sleep disturbance.

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 Republic of the Philippines
Bicol University
College of Social Science and Philosophy
Department of Psychology
Daraga, Albay

METHODOLOGY

Design

The experimenters used a quasi-experimental approach that focused on concentration. The

purpose of this study is to determine whether a noisy setting has an impact on concentration. A

study with independent measures was conducted with two groups of 15 people each.

Participants

A total of thirty (30) second-year students from Block B of Bachelor of Science in

Psychology of Bicol University - Daraga Campus, were involved in the experiment and randomly

divided into two groups (experimental and control) with 15 students in each.

Materials

The materials utilized for this experiment includes answer sheets made of paper, a timer, a

projector, a Bluetooth speaker, a phone with noise recording capabilities, and a laptop. The

experimenters employed IBM SPSS Statistics, a piece of software for the analysis of statistical

data, as their statistical instruments. The t-test for independent measures, which ascertains the

significant difference between the means of two groups on a selected variable of interest, is

employed in the program to ascertain the findings of this experiment.

Procedure

The experimenters conducted this type of experiment to find out how noise affects a

student's ability to concentrate. The experimental process took roughly 30 minutes to complete.

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 Republic of the Philippines
Bicol University
College of Social Science and Philosophy
Department of Psychology
Daraga, Albay

To conduct this experiment, two distinct groups were given a timed exam that required

them to respond to a series of questions after viewing a set of photographs. During the test, the

experimental group was exposed to noise (via a recorded audio played on a speaker), but the

control group was not. The impact of noise on a group's ability to concentrate will depend on how

many questions each member of the group correctly answers.

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 Republic of the Philippines
Bicol University
College of Social Science and Philosophy
Department of Psychology
Daraga, Albay

RESULTS

This experiment aims to answer the research question, “Is there a significant effect on

students’ concentration when taking a test in a noisy environment?” The data analysis from the

data collection process is shown in this section, along with the t-test for Independent Measures'

interpretation.

Table 1. Raw Scores of each group

Raw Scores

Participant No. Control Group (A) Experimental Group (B)

01 9 4

02 6 5

03 9 8

04 2 7

05 9 3

06 3 8

07 6 5

08 8 5

09 6 3

10 7 3

11 2 10

12 10 2

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 Republic of the Philippines
Bicol University
College of Social Science and Philosophy
Department of Psychology
Daraga, Albay

13 6 3

14 8 5

15 6 1

Total 97 72

Mean 6.47 4.8

Table 1 shows the raw scores obtained by the participants in each group during the experiment.

Table 2. Descriptive Statistics

Group N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error

Mean

Control 15 6.47 2.532 0.654

Experimental 15 4.80 2.513 0.649

Table 2 shows the summary of the data obtained from the experiment.

Table 3. Independent Samples Test

Levene’s t-test for Equality of Means

Test for

Equality of

Variances

F Sig. t df Mean 95%

Difference Confidence

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 Republic of the Philippines
Bicol University
College of Social Science and Philosophy
Department of Psychology
Daraga, Albay

Sig. Std. Interval of the

(2- Error Difference

tailed) Difference Lower Upper

Equal

variances .001 .974 1.810 28 .081 1.667 .921 -.220 3.553

assumed

Note: level of significance (α) = 0.05

Table 3 shows the results of an independent sample t-test on both groups.

Statistical Analysis

The raw scores for the experimental and control groups are shown in Table 1, with 10

representing the greatest score. Table 2 displays the descriptive statistics for both groups, including

mean, standard deviation, and mean standard error. The significance or p-value for Table 3's

Levene's Test for Equality of Variance is 0.974, which is not statistically significant, indicating

that the Table 2 shows that both groups' variances are identical, with a standard deviation of 2.5

for each group. The groups have homogeneous variance; hence it is safe to interpret the t-value

and p-value. Table 3 shows that there is no significant difference between the means of the two

groups at the p-value of.081, which is higher than the significance level of 0.05. This finding

suggests that student’s ability to focus during a test is unaffected by the noise in the environment.

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 Republic of the Philippines
Bicol University
College of Social Science and Philosophy
Department of Psychology
Daraga, Albay

DISCUSSION

This study investigated the perceived effects of noise pollution on students’ concentration

in BS Psychology. The findings are discussed based on the result of data analysis. According to

the findings, as the major task, individuals did less well. At a statistically significant level, the

noise condition outperformed the silence condition on the working memory task. In the case of the

prospective memory task, however, the results indicate that noise had no statistically significant

effect on the participant's performance in the noise condition compared to the silence condition. It

has been demonstrated that the source of the noise is a weak predictor of how well an individual

would perform on working memory tasks. This is intriguing because, as Beaman (2004) contends

in his research, the characteristics of noise, particularly its irrelevance and discomfort, may be the

primary elements in its impact on human performance. In comparison, it is conceivable that, if this

current study had used some other 9 source of noise it could again get similar results. In his study,

Beaman used a so-called memory operation span task to measure working memory.

The personal mental state of the participants was not pre-measured prior to the tests, which

may have had an impact on the participants' performance (e.g., participant may have been

exhausted, furious, annoyed, etc.). The second drawback was the very small sample size that was

used; a larger sample size would have been better for the results' ability to be generalized.

To be able to get more precise results, future research should seek to adopt repeated

measure design with bigger sample numbers. Examine additional domain-specific memory

mechanisms that might be impacted by noise. To gain a deeper understanding of this research area,

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 Republic of the Philippines
Bicol University
College of Social Science and Philosophy
Department of Psychology
Daraga, Albay

it would be intriguing to analyze how noise affects people's working memory and prospective

memory using a similar design and approach to the one used in the current study.

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 Republic of the Philippines
Bicol University
College of Social Science and Philosophy
Department of Psychology
Daraga, Albay

REFERENCES

Basner, M., Babisch, W., Davis, A., Brink, M., Clark, C., Janssen, S., & Stansfeld, S. (2014).

Auditory and non-auditory effects of noise on health. The Lancet, 383(9925), 1325–1332.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(13)61613-X

Baddeley, A. (2010). Working memory. Current Biology, 20(4), R136–R140.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.12.014

Stansfeld, S. A., & Matheson, M. P. (2003). Noise pollution: non-auditory effects on health. British

Medical Bulletin, 68(1), 243–257. https://doi.org/10.1093/bmb/ldg033

Szalma, J. L., & Hancock, P. A. (20110627). Noise effects on human performance: A meta-

analytic synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 137(4), 682. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023987

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