Effects of Noise Exposure and Cognitive Load on Physiological Responses in Work Contexts

The adverse influence of noise on human health arises from its nature as an environmental stressor, affecting physiological, psychological and behavioral processes (Babisch, 2008; Guan et al., 2020). According to Golmohammadi et al. (2021), it was found that physiological responses can undergo significant changes when exposure to noise exceeds 70 dB. Several physiological measures can be employed to investigate the combined effects of noise exposure and mental workload on the body's reactions (Ke et al., 2021). In this context, there is growing recognition that the joint use of multiple measures provides a more comprehensive understanding of human responses than the isolated application of a single indicator (Hogervorst et al., 2014). Although the literature has widely debated the relationship between sound pressure levels and physiological reactions, few studies address the influence of other noise quality parameters, such as clarity. To fill this gap, we combined the application of multi-attribute battery (MATB) tasks with recordings of ECG, EEG, salivary cortisol and heart rate variability, allowing us to evaluate physiological responses to different noise characteristics and levels of cognitive load, in addition to investigating their effects on task performance.