Background white noise and speech facilitate visual working memory

Abstract

In contrast to background white noise, the detrimental effects of background speech on verbal working memory (WM) were often explained by speech interference in the same verbal modality. Yet, those results were confounded with potential differences between arousal levels induced by speech and white noise. To address the role of arousal, in the present study, we minimized the verbal interference and used a visual WM task to test the influence of background speech or white noise. Electrodermal activity (EDA) and Electromyography (EMG) were recorded simultaneously to indicate the arousal levels of participants. Results showed that both background speech and white noise significantly improved visual WM performance. The change of performance further correlated with the change of physiological signals linked with arousal. Taken together, our results suggest that both background speech and white noise facilitate visual WM through raising the arousal level.