EPOS Audio Solutions Built on EPOS BrainAdapt™ Technologies Improve Memory Recall, Study Finds
Scientific Whitepaper 2023 – “The effect of noise attenuation on memory recall”
In both professional and personal contexts, we often need to understand speech and remember what is said to perform at our best. However, in today’s world with distractions abound, this can be difficult. Humans have limited cognitive capacity, so when we devote cognitive resources to listening, i.e., when recognizing speech, we will have a reduced capacity to perform other concurrent tasks, such as memory recall. If we listen to speech through headsets and speakers with poor audio quality, our ability to listen will be challenged even further.
The clinical study* presented in this whitepaper investigated the benefits of noise damping technology used in EPOS audio devices. The aim was to demonstrate how damping effects the listening effort exerted by the study’s participants. The research was conducted by EPOS at the Centre for Applied Audiology Research (CAAR)1, Oticon, Denmark, with a focus on an auditory recall test designed to measure the resources devoted to listening as well as memory for speech, which is crucial for responding and reacting during communication.
The results of the study show that noise attenuation improved recall performance by 10%. The findings suggest that reduced listening effort liberates cognitive resources that can be used for speech processing and encoding of information into long-term memory. In other words, noise attenuation can liberate cognitive resources that would have been used for listening effort which are instead used for memory.
This study is just one example of decades of psychoacoustic research conducted by the Demant Group, which EPOS is proud to be a part of. The learnings collected in this study and others are applied in the ongoing development of EPOS BrainAdapt™ solutions, which are designed to support the brain’s natural way of processing sound. To learn more about EPOS solutions and the science behind them, click here.