Masking plus active noise cancellations ability to aid reading comprehension in a noisy environment, compared to a quiet room

The work presented in this paper investigated how participants’ reading comprehension performance was affected by a background disturbance and how headphones that use active noise canceling and a masking system could attenuate any demerits. This work built on the work of Radun et al. [5] who investigated the cognitive performance, perceived disturbance, and physiological response of the participants to different noise environments. Our research followed a similar method, but on a smaller scale. We conducted a within-subjects experiment with 9 participants, specifically students, where each participant performed three different reading comprehension tests under three different noise conditions. These conditions were: a quiet room, a room with disturbing background noise, and the previous condition but with noise canceling headphones playing masking noise. Empirical measures included reading time, number of corrects answers and a survey regarding their perception of the text and environment. A repeated measures ANOVA was used to assess the effects of noise environment on performance and perceived disturbed. Our findings indicated that the perceived disturbance of the participants was greatly affected by the noise environment and was noticeably reduced when ANC headphones with masking were used However, the results on the performance of the participants did not prove to be statistically significant and therefore it was not possible to draw any conclusion. From these results we could confirm that the specific ANC and masking system used in this study can attenuate perceived disturbances from noise, although no measurable improvement in reading comprehension was observed. This could imply similar results with other models of headphones, but is not confirmed within the scope of this study.