Evidence for a competitive relationship between executive functions and statistical learning.

The ability of the brain to extract patterns from the environment and predict future events, known as statistical learning, has been proposed to interact in a competitive manner with prefrontal lobe-related networks and their characteristic cognitive or executive functions. However, it remains unclear whether these cognitive functions also possess a competitive relationship with implicit statistical learning across individuals and at the level of latent executive function components. In order to address this currently unknown aspect, we investigated, in two independent experiments (NStudy1 = 186, NStudy2 = 157), the relationship between implicit statistical learning, measured by the Alternating Serial Reaction Time task, and executive functions, measured by multiple neuropsychological tests. In both studies, a modest, but consistent negative correlation between implicit statistical learning and most executive function measures was observed. Factor analysis further revealed that a factor representing verbal fluency and complex working memory seemed to drive these negative correlations. Thus, the antagonistic relationship between implicit statistical learning and executive functions might specifically be mediated by the updating component of executive functions or/and long-term memory access.

Cross-frequency coupling in cortico-hippocampal networks supports the maintenance of sequential auditory information in short-term memory.

It has been suggested that cross-frequency coupling in cortico-hippocampal networks enables the maintenance of multiple visuo-spatial items in working memory. However, whether this mechanism acts as a global neural code for memory retention across sensory modalities remains to be demonstrated. Intracranial EEG data were recorded while drug-resistant patients with epilepsy performed a delayed matched-to-sample task with tone sequences. We manipulated task difficulty by varying the memory load and the duration of the silent retention period between the to-be-compared sequences. We show that the strength of theta-gamma phase amplitude coupling in the superior temporal sulcus, the inferior frontal gyrus, the inferior temporal gyrus, and the hippocampus (i) supports the short-term retention of auditory sequences; (ii) decodes correct and incorrect memory trials as revealed by machine learning analysis; and (iii) is positively correlated with individual short-term memory performance. Specifically, we show that successful task performance is associated with consistent phase coupling in these regions across participants, with gamma bursts restricted to specific theta phase ranges corresponding to higher levels of neural excitability. These findings highlight the role of cortico-hippocampal activity in auditory short-term memory and expand our knowledge about the role of cross-frequency coupling as a global biological mechanism for information processing, integration, and memory in the human brain.

Auditory cortex and beyond: Deficits in congenital amusia.

Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder of music perception and production, with the observed deficits contrasting with the sophisticated music processing reported for the general population. Musical deficits within amusia have been hypothesized to arise from altered pitch processing, with impairments in pitch discrimination and, notably, short-term memory. We here review research investigating its behavioral and neural correlates, in particular the impairments at encoding, retention, and recollection of pitch information, as well as how these impairments extend to the processing of pitch cues in speech and emotion. The impairments have been related to altered brain responses in a distributed fronto-temporal network, which can be observed also at rest. Neuroimaging studies revealed changes in connectivity patterns within this network and beyond, shedding light on the brain dynamics underlying auditory cognition. Interestingly, some studies revealed spared implicit pitch processing in congenital amusia, showing the power of implicit cognition in the music domain. Building on these findings, together with audiovisual integration and other beneficial mechanisms, we outline perspectives for training and rehabilitation and the future directions of this research domain.

Episodic memory and recognition are influenced by cues' sensory modality: comparing odours, music and faces using virtual reality.

Most everyday experiences are multisensory, and all senses can trigger the conscious re-experience of unique personal events embedded in their specific spatio-temporal context. Yet, little is known about how a cue's sensory modality influences episodic memory, and which step of this process is impacted. This study investigated recognition and episodic memory across olfactory, auditory and visual sensory modalities in a laboratory-ecological task using a non-immersive virtual reality device. At encoding, participants freely and actively explored unique and rich episodes in a three-room house where boxes delivered odours, musical pieces and pictures of face. At retrieval, participants were presented with modality-specific memory cues and were told to 1) recognise encoded cues among distractors and, 2) go to the room and select the box in which they encountered them at encoding. Memory performance and response times revealed that music and faces outperformed odours in recognition memory, but that odours and faces outperformed music in evoking encoding context. Interestingly, correct recognition of music and faces was accompanied by more profound inspirations than correct rejection. By directly comparing memory performance across sensory modalities, our study demonstrated that despite limited recognition, odours are powerful cues to evoke specific episodic memory retrieval.

Regular rhythmic primes improve sentence repetition in children with developmental language disorder.

Recently reported links between rhythm and grammar processing have opened new perspectives for using rhythm in clinical interventions for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Previous research using the rhythmic priming paradigm has shown improved performance on language tasks after regular rhythmic primes compared to control conditions. However, this research has been limited to effects of rhythmic priming on grammaticality judgments. The current study investigated whether regular rhythmic primes could also benefit sentence repetition, a task requiring proficiency in complex syntax-an area of difficultly for children with DLD. Regular rhythmic primes improved sentence repetition performance compared to irregular rhythmic primes in children with DLD and with typical development-an effect that did not occur with a non-linguistic control task. These findings suggest processing overlap for musical rhythm and linguistic syntax, with implications for the use of rhythmic stimulation for treatment of children with DLD in clinical research and practice.

A Recurrent Connectionist Model of Melody Perception: An Exploration Using TRACX2.

Are similar, or even identical, mechanisms used in the computational modeling of speech segmentation, serial image processing, and music processing? We address this question by exploring how TRACX2, a recognition-based, recursive connectionist autoencoder model of chunking and sequence segmentation, which has successfully simulated speech and serial-image processing, might be applied to elementary melody perception. The model, a three-layer autoencoder that recognizes "chunks" of short sequences of intervals that have been frequently encountered on input, is trained on the tone intervals of melodically simple French children's songs. It dynamically incorporates the internal representations of these chunks into new input. Its internal representations cluster in a manner that is consistent with "human-recognizable" melodic categories. TRACX2 is sensitive to both contour and proximity information in the musical chunks that it encounters in its input. It shows the "end-of-word" superiority effect demonstrated by Saffran et al. (1999) for short musical phrases. The overall findings suggest that the recursive autoassociative chunking mechanism, as implemented in TRACX2, may be a general segmentation and chunking mechanism, underlying not only word- and image-chunking, but also elementary melody processing.

Individuals with congenital amusia remember music they like.

Music is better recognized when it is liked. Does this association remain evident when music perception and memory are severely impaired, as in congenital amusia? We tested 11 amusic and 11 matched control participants, asking whether liking of a musical excerpt influences subsequent recognition. In an initial exposure phase, participants-unaware that their recognition would be tested subsequently-listened to 24 musical excerpts and judged how much they liked each excerpt. In the test phase that followed, participants rated whether they recognized the previously heard excerpts, which were intermixed with an equal number of foils matched for mode, tempo, and musical genre. As expected, recognition was in general impaired for amusic participants compared with control participants. For both groups, however, recognition was better for excerpts that were liked, and the liking enhancement did not differ between groups. These results contribute to a growing body of research that examines the complex interplay between emotions and cognitive processes. More specifically, they extend previous findings related to amusics' impairments to a new memory paradigm and suggest that (1) amusic individuals are sensitive to an aesthetic and subjective dimension of the music-listening experience, and (2) emotions can support memory processes even in a population with impaired music perception and memory.

Modality-specific and modality-independent neural representations work in concert in predictive processes during sequence learning.

Probabilistic sequence learning supports the development of skills and enables predictive processing. It remains contentious whether visuomotor sequence learning is driven by the representation of the visual sequence (perceptual coding) or by the representation of the response sequence (motor coding). Neurotypical adults performed a visuomotor sequence learning task. Learning occurred incidentally as it was evidenced by faster responses to high-probability than to low-probability targets. To uncover the neurophysiology of the learning process, we conducted both univariate analyses and multivariate pattern analyses (MVPAs) on the temporally decomposed EEG signal. Univariate analyses showed that sequence learning modulated the amplitudes of the motor code of the decomposed signal but not in the perceptual and perceptual-motor signals. However, MVPA revealed that all 3 codes of the decomposed EEG contribute to the neurophysiological representation of the learnt probabilities. Source localization revealed the involvement of a wider network of frontal and parietal activations that were distinctive across coding levels. These findings suggest that perceptual and motor coding both contribute to the learning of sequential regularities rather than to a neither-nor distinction. Moreover, modality-specific encoding worked in concert with modality-independent representations, which suggests that probabilistic sequence learning is nonunitary and encompasses a set of encoding principles.

Consonance Perception in Congenital Amusia: Behavioral and Brain Responses to Harmonicity and Beating Cues.

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulties in the perception and production of music, including the perception of consonance and dissonance, or the judgment of certain combinations of pitches as more pleasant than others. Two perceptual cues for dissonance are inharmonicity (the lack of a common fundamental frequency between components) and beating (amplitude fluctuations produced by close, interacting frequency components). Amusic individuals have previously been reported to be insensitive to inharmonicity, but to exhibit normal sensitivity to beats. In the present study, we measured adaptive discrimination thresholds in amusic participants and found elevated thresholds for both cues. We recorded EEG and measured the MMN in evoked potentials to consonance and dissonance deviants in an oddball paradigm. The amplitude of the MMN response was similar overall for amusic and control participants; however, in controls, there was a tendency toward larger MMNs for inharmonicity than for beating cues, whereas the opposite tendency was observed for the amusic participants. These findings suggest that initial encoding of consonance cues may be intact in amusia despite impaired behavioral performance, but that the relative weight of nonspectral (beating) cues may be increased for amusic individuals.

Improving non-native duration contrast with dichotic training in dyslexic and non-dyslexic individuals.

Perceiving and producing English phonemic vowel length contrasts is challenging for non-native speakers. According to multi-time resolution models, endogenous slow/fast rhythms contribute, respectively, in the right/left hemispheres, to long/short acoustic cue processing. This study introduced a perceptual training method implementing dichotic stimulation to improve /i:/-/ɪ/ processing by promoting hemispheric complementarity. Twenty non-dyslexic and 20 dyslexic French adults received 1 hr-training over 3 days. Productions were evaluated with pre-/post-tests. Training enhanced vowel duration contrast in word production by /i:/ lengthening and /ɪ/ shortening in both groups. Adults with dyslexia compensated fewer /i:/ lengthening by /ɪ/ shortening than did non-dyslexic adults. Transfer from perceptual training to production seems possible for foreign-language learning even in dyslexic adults. The extent to which dichotic presentation contributed to training effectiveness cannot be evaluated here, but the triggering of lengthening and shortening mechanisms suggests that lateralized complementary skills have been enhanced by dichotic stimulation.

Do developmental dyslexia and congenital amusia share underlying impairments?

Developmental dyslexia and congenital amusia have common characteristics. Yet, their possible association in some individuals has been addressed only scarcely. Recently, two converging studies reported a sizable comorbidity rate between these two neurodevelopmental disorders (Couvignou et al., Cognitive Neuropsychology 2019; Couvignou & Kolinsky, Neuropsychologia 2021). However, the reason for their association remains unclear. Here, we investigate the hypothesis of shared underlying impairments between dyslexia and amusia. Fifteen dyslexic children with amusia (DYS+A), 15 dyslexic children without amusia (DYS-A), and two groups of 25 typically developing children matched on either chronological age (CA) or reading level (RL) were assessed with a behavioral battery aiming to investigate phonological and pitch processing capacities at auditory memory, perceptual awareness, and attentional levels. Overall, our results suggest that poor auditory serial-order memory increases susceptibility to comorbidity between dyslexia and amusia and may play a role in the development of the comorbid phenotype. In contrast, the impairments observed in the DYS+A children for auditory item memory, perceptual awareness, and attention might be a consequence of their reduced reading experience combined with weaker musical skills. Comparing DYS+A and DYS-A children suggests that the latter are more resourceful and/or have more effective compensatory strategies, or that their phenotype results from a different developmental trajectory. We will discuss the relevance of these findings for delving into the etiology of these two developmental disorders and address their implications for future research and practice.

Musical Emotion Categorization with Vocoders of Varying Temporal and Spectral Content.

While previous research investigating music emotion perception of cochlear implant (CI) users observed that temporal cues informing tempo largely convey emotional arousal (relaxing/stimulating), it remains unclear how other properties of the temporal content may contribute to the transmission of arousal features. Moreover, while detailed spectral information related to pitch and harmony in music - often not well perceived by CI users- reportedly conveys emotional valence (positive, negative), it remains unclear how the quality of spectral content contributes to valence perception. Therefore, the current study used vocoders to vary temporal and spectral content of music and tested music emotion categorization (joy, fear, serenity, sadness) in 23 normal-hearing participants. Vocoders were varied with two carriers (sinewave or noise; primarily modulating temporal information), and two filter orders (low or high; primarily modulating spectral information). Results indicated that emotion categorization was above-chance in vocoded excerpts but poorer than in a non-vocoded control condition. Among vocoded conditions, better temporal content (sinewave carriers) improved emotion categorization with a large effect while better spectral content (high filter order) improved it with a small effect. Arousal features were comparably transmitted in non-vocoded and vocoded conditions, indicating that lower temporal content successfully conveyed emotional arousal. Valence feature transmission steeply declined in vocoded conditions, revealing that valence perception was difficult for both lower and higher spectral content. The reliance on arousal information for emotion categorization of vocoded music suggests that efforts to refine temporal cues in the CI user signal may immediately benefit their music emotion perception.

Enhanced mismatch negativity in harmonic compared with inharmonic sounds.

Many natural sounds have frequency spectra composed of integer multiples of a fundamental frequency. This property, known as harmonicity, plays an important role in auditory information processing. However, the extent to which harmonicity influences the processing of sound features beyond pitch is still unclear. This is interesting because harmonic sounds have lower information entropy than inharmonic sounds. According to predictive processing accounts of perception, this property could produce more salient neural responses due to the brain's weighting of sensory signals according to their uncertainty. In the present study, we used electroencephalography to investigate brain responses to harmonic and inharmonic sounds commonly occurring in music: Piano tones and hi-hat cymbal sounds. In a multifeature oddball paradigm, we measured mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a responses to timbre, intensity, and location deviants in listeners with and without congenital amusia-an impairment of pitch processing. As hypothesized, we observed larger amplitudes and earlier latencies (for both MMN and P3a) in harmonic compared with inharmonic sounds. These harmonicity effects were modulated by sound feature. Moreover, the difference in P3a latency between harmonic and inharmonic sounds was larger for controls than amusics. We propose an explanation of these results based on predictive coding and discuss the relationship between harmonicity, information entropy, and precision weighting of prediction errors.

Tonal structures benefit short-term memory for real music: Evidence from non-musicians and individuals with congenital amusia.

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of music processing, which includes impaired pitch memory, associated to abnormalities in the right fronto-temporal network. Previous research has shown that tonal structures (as defined by the Western musical system) improve short-term memory performance for short tone sequences (in comparison to atonal versions) in non-musician listeners, but the tonal structures only benefited response times in amusic individuals. We here tested the potential benefit of tonal structures for short-term memory with more complex musical material. Congenital amusics and their matched non-musician controls were required to indicate whether two excerpts were the same or different. Results confirmed impaired performance of amusic individuals in this short-term memory task. However, most importantly, both groups of participants showed better memory performance for tonal material than for atonal material. These results revealed that even amusics' impaired short-term memory for pitch shows classical characteristics of short-term memory, that is the mnemonic benefit of structure in the to-be-memorized material. The findings show that amusic individuals have acquired some implicit knowledge of regularities of their culture, allowing for implicit processing of tonal structures, which benefits to memory even for complex material.

You got rhythm, or more: The multidimensionality of rhythmic abilities.

Humans have a remarkable capacity for perceiving and producing rhythm. Rhythmic competence is often viewed as a single concept, with participants who perform more or less accurately on a single rhythm task. However, research is revealing numerous sub-processes and competencies involved in rhythm perception and production, which can be selectively impaired or enhanced. To investigate whether different patterns of performance emerge across tasks and individuals, we measured performance across a range of rhythm tasks from different test batteries. Distinct performance patterns could potentially reveal separable rhythmic competencies that may draw on distinct neural mechanisms. Participants completed nine rhythm perception and production tasks selected from the Battery for the Assessment of Auditory Sensorimotor and Timing Abilities (BAASTA), the Beat Alignment Test (BAT), the Beat-Based Advantage task (BBA), and two tasks from the Burgundy best Musical Aptitude Test (BbMAT). Principal component analyses revealed clear separation of task performance along three main dimensions: production, beat-based rhythm perception, and sequence memory-based rhythm perception. Hierarchical cluster analyses supported these results, revealing clusters of participants who performed selectively more or less accurately along different dimensions. The current results support the hypothesis of divergence of rhythmic skills. Based on these results, we provide guidelines towards a comprehensive testing of rhythm abilities, including at least three short tasks measuring: (1) rhythm production (e.g., tapping to metronome/music), (2) beat-based rhythm perception (e.g., BAT), and (3) sequence memory-based rhythm processing (e.g., BBA). Implications for underlying neural mechanisms, future research, and potential directions for rehabilitation and training programs are discussed.

When Visual Cues Do Not Help the Beat: Evidence for a Detrimental Effect of Moving Point-Light Figures on Rhythmic Priming.

Rhythm perception involves strong auditory-motor connections that can be enhanced with movement. However, it is unclear whether just seeing someone moving to a rhythm can enhance auditory-motor coupling, resulting in stronger entrainment. Rhythmic priming studies show that presenting regular rhythms before naturally spoken sentences can enhance grammaticality judgments compared to irregular rhythms or other baseline conditions. The current study investigated whether introducing a point-light figure moving in time with regular rhythms could enhance the rhythmic priming effect. Three experiments revealed that the addition of a visual cue did not benefit rhythmic priming in comparison to auditory conditions with a static image. In Experiment 1 (27 7-8-year-old children), grammaticality judgments were poorer after audio-visual regular rhythms (with a bouncing point-light figure) compared to auditory-only regular rhythms. In Experiments 2 (31 adults) and 3 (31 different adults), there was no difference in grammaticality judgments after audio-visual regular rhythms compared to auditory-only irregular rhythms for either a bouncing point-light figure (Experiment 2) or a swaying point-light figure (Experiment 3). Comparison of the observed performance with previous data suggested that the audio-visual component removed the regular prime benefit. These findings suggest that the visual cues used in this study do not enhance rhythmic priming and could hinder the effect by potentially creating a dual-task situation. In addition, individual differences in sensory-motor and social scales of music reward influenced the effect of the visual cue. Implications for future audio-visual experiments aiming to enhance beat processing, and the importance of individual differences will be discussed.

Digital Additional Risk Minimization Measures: An Exploratory Study Using Qualitative Feedback from Healthcare Professionals and Patients Across Six Countries.

BACKGROUND: Additional risk minimization measures (aRMMs) are required for some pharmaceutical products when routine risk minimization measures (i.e., product labeling) are deemed insufficient. Measures often include educational materials, such as paper brochures, leaflets, and/or alert cards that provide information to healthcare professionals and patients on the key risks associated with a product and risk minimization actions to take should particular signs or symptoms arise. Paper-based educational aRMMs have several limitations. They do not present information in an interactive manner, and their update and distribution can be costly and often complex. Measuring how effective they are in achieving their aims can also be difficult. Digital methods offer design and delivery flexibility, easier updating processes, opportunities to increase engagement with important information, as well possibilities for tracking distribution, receipt, and potentially understanding of the materials. Pharmaceutical companies have started to look to digital methods as an option for educational aRMMs, alongside paper materials. OBJECTIVES: Research into healthcare professionals and patient needs and preferences, as well as the general acceptability of digital educational options is needed to establish a baseline. This was an exploratory study intended to provide initial insights on the acceptability of digital aRMMs and to inform future research directions. METHODS: Digital concepts for educational aRMMs, one for healthcare professionals and one for patients, were evaluated with 30 healthcare professionals and 20 patients in six countries through 1:1 Zoom calls, with responses recorded in a structured Qualtrics-based survey. Criteria for selecting the six countries included local familiarity with aRMMs as well as interest in and capability to deliver a potential digital aRMM program by the sponsoring company's affiliate teams. Of the healthcare professionals, 19 were rheumatologists and 11 were dermatologists. 16 patients had rheumatologic (rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis) conditions and four had atopic dermatitis. These conditions were chosen as they aligned to potential therapeutic areas where the sponsoring company may have the opportunity to use a digital aRMM. Participants were given an overview of the concept as well as the opportunity to interact with it directly via the "control screen" function in Zoom before questions were posed. RESULTS: The results demonstrated that the majority of healthcare professionals (87%) and all patients interviewed would prefer website-based or app-based delivery, respectively, of aRMM information instead of, or alongside traditional paper-based approaches, with only 13% of healthcare professionals and no patients expressing a preference for paper-only communication. CONCLUSIONS: Given new options offered by digital technology, its widespread use in many fields, and the importance of patient safety as a topic, there is an imperative for pharmaceutical companies and regulators to work together to establish a way forward for the use of digital options for aRMMs. This study is limited in its generalizability but offers some ideas for future research directions.

Auditory and visual short-term memory: influence of material type, contour, and musical expertise.

Short-term memory has mostly been investigated with verbal or visuospatial stimuli and less so with other categories of stimuli. Moreover, the influence of sensory modality has been explored almost solely in the verbal domain. The present study compared visual and auditory short-term memory for different types of materials, aiming to understand whether sensory modality and material type can influence short-term memory performance. Furthermore, we aimed to assess if music expertise can modulate memory performance, as previous research has reported better auditory memory (and to some extent, visual memory), and better auditory contour recognition for musicians than non-musicians. To do so, we adapted the same recognition paradigm (delayed-matching to sample) across different types of stimuli. In each trial, participants (musicians and non-musicians) were presented with two sequences of events, separated by a silent delay, and had to indicate whether the two sequences were identical or different. The performance was compared for auditory and visual materials belonging to three different categories: (1) verbal (i.e., syllables); (2) nonverbal (i.e., that could not be easily denominated) with contour (based on loudness or luminance variations); and (3) nonverbal without contour (pink noise sequences or kanji letters sequences). Contour and no-contour conditions referred to whether the sequence can entail (or not) a contour (i.e., a pattern of up and down changes) based on non-pitch features. Results revealed a selective advantage of musicians for auditory no-contour stimuli and for contour stimuli (both visual and auditory), suggesting that musical expertise is associated with specific short-term memory advantages in domains close to the trained domain, also extending cross-modally when stimuli have contour information. Moreover, our results suggest a role of encoding strategies (i.e., how the material is represented mentally during the task) for short-term-memory performance.

Development of auditory cognition in 5- to 10-year-old children: Focus on musical and verbal short-term memory.

Developmental aspects of auditory cognition were investigated in 5-to-10-year-old children (n = 100). Musical and verbal short-term memory (STM) were assessed by means of delayed matching-to-sample tasks (DMST) (comparison of two four-item sequences separated by a silent retention delay), with two levels of difficulty. For musical and verbal materials, children's performance increased from 5 years to about 7 years of age, then remained stable up to 10 years of age, with performance remaining inferior to performance of young adults. Children and adults performed better with verbal material than with musical material. To investigate auditory cognition beyond STM, we assessed speech-in-noise perception with a four-alternative forced-choice task with two conditions of phonological difficulty and two levels of cocktail-party noise intensity. Partial correlations, factoring out the effect of age, showed a significant link between musical STM and speech-in-noise perception in the condition with increased noise intensity. Our findings reveal that auditory STM improves over development with a critical phase around 6-7 years of age, yet these abilities appear to be still immature at 10 years. Musical and verbal STM might in particular share procedural and serial order processes. Furthermore, musical STM and the ability to perceive relevant speech signals in cocktail-party noise might rely on shared cognitive resources, possibly related to pitch encoding. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that auditory STM is assessed with the same paradigm for musical and verbal material during childhood, providing perspectives regarding diagnosis and remediation in developmental learning disorders.

The Emotional Effect of Background Music on Selective Attention of Adults.

Daily activities can often be performed while listening to music, which could influence the ability to select relevant stimuli while ignoring distractors. Previous studies have established that the level of arousal of music (e.g., relaxing/stimulating) has the ability to modulate mood and affect the performance of cognitive tasks. The aim of this research was to explore the effect of relaxing and stimulating background music on selective attention. To this aim, 46 healthy adults performed a Stroop-type task in five different sound environments: relaxing music, stimulating music, relaxing music-matched noise, stimulating music-matched noise, and silence. Results showed that response times for incongruent and congruent trials as well as the Stroop interference effect were similar across conditions. Interestingly, results revealed a decreased error rate for congruent trials in the relaxing music condition as compared to the relaxing music-matched noise condition, and a similar tendency between relaxing music and stimulating music-matched noise. Taken together, the absence of difference between background music and silence conditions suggest that they have similar effects on adult's selective attention capacities, while noise seems to have a detrimental impact, particularly when the task is easier cognitively. In conclusion, the type of sound stimulation in the environment seems to be a factor that can affect cognitive tasks performance.