Word recognition in loud noise

Loud noise has been shown to bias environmental stimulus selection to high-priority or ‘dominant’ task and stimulus features while causing relative neglect of less dominant aspects. The present concern was whether a similar influence of noise would occur when selecting, or rather, retrieving information from memory. Separate groups performed a semantic recognition task in 95 dB(A) ‘noise’ or 70 dB(A) ‘quiet’ conditions. Recognition of semantically ‘high-dominance’ words was reliably faster in noise but ‘low-dominance’ recognition was not impaired relative to performance in quiet conditions. On this basis, the results only partially support a possible common principle governing selection of environmental and memorial information in noise. However, they confirm Eysenck's (1975) contention that arousal may affect retrieval processes (in addition to initial learning) and that failure to account for the former influence may obscure inferences drawn from previous research.