CoEN (Cognitive Effort in Noise) App: a serious game application for the assessment of children’s ability to focus in noisy environments

Children spend most of their time in schools. Unfortunately, classrooms do not always provide an optimal acoustic environment for learning, due to the presence of noise (whether external or internal) and reverberation. It has been widely demonstrated that noise has negative consequences on children’s learning (on reading and math) and cognition (on attention and working memory). CoEN (Cognitive Effort in Noise) is an App developed to easily assess children’s executive functions when exposed to noisy environments. The App, available for tablets, contains six standardized neuropsychological tests adapted in the form of engaging games. Verbal working memory, visual attention and non-verbal inhibition skills are assessed in quiet and noise. In this contribution, we will present the design and evaluation of the app. The tests performed in the evaluation phase involved 233 primary school children, with and without learning disabilities or sensory impairments. Preliminary results showed that CoEN was easy to use, engaging and enjoyable for the children. It also captured individual differences in children’s response to noise. Overall, the app provides a promising tool for children, as well as for teachers, parents or professionals, who wish to evaluate their cognitive abilities to cope with noise in an easy and engaging way

How noise affect cognitive performances of children with additional learning needs: a preliminary study

The goal of the study is to investigate how background noise can affect children’s cognitive performance, and whether it affects in similar way the cognitive performance of children without and with additional learning need, like a learning disability (LD) or an attentional deficit disorder (ADHD). Two visual attentional tasks, an inhibition task and a verbal WM task have been administered by a serious game App (“Cognitive Effort in Noise” – CoEN) to 62 typically developing children and to 17 children with a diagnosis of LD or ADHD, between 7 and 12 years of age. All tasks have been performed in both quiet and noise (multitalker babble at 60dB through headphones). The data analysis revealed a detrimental effect of noise on children’s WM performance in both groups. However, noise had also a positive influence on the attentional performance of children with additional needs

Individual differences in children’s cognitive performance in noise

The effects of noise on children’s classroom performance have been investigated primarily in terms of listening effort. However, several learning activities in classrooms do not involve listening. Learning activities require attentional resources, the ability to control for interferences, and verbal working memory. The study explored how these cognitive abilities are influenced by background babble noise, and if individual factors, like having or not attentional problems associated to a learning disability (LD) or attention- deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), can modulate the effects of noise on children’s cognitive performance. Fifty-eight typically developing children and 13, 8 to12 years-old, children with either attentional problems associated to LDs or ADHD (n=10) or performance 2 SD below the mean on standardized attention tests (n=3) completed two visual attention tasks, a cognitive inhibition, and a verbal digit span task in quiet and 65dB babble noise. Significant differences between groups were found on both visual attention tasks and the digit span task in quiet, but not in noise. The visual attention performance of the LD/ADHD group improved significantly in noise, whereas the performance on the digit span task declined slightly. These results suggest a facilitative effect of babble noise for the children with attention problems, though limited to non-verbal tasks

The cognitive effects of noise on the memory performance of children with cochlear implants

Concentrating to perform cognitive tasks in a noisy environment requires to re-allocate mental resources to overcome the interference of noise. This process and the resulting fatigue, i.e., cognitive effort, can be detrimental to hearing children’s cognitive performance and ultimately to their learning. However, we know little of how background noise affects the cognitive performance of children with hearing loss. In a pilot trial, we addressed this research question. Eight cochlear implanted (CI) children and 5 age-matched normally hearing children (NH) (7-12 years) carried out an auditory attention task and a digit span task in quiet and babble noise. Behavioral (accuracy), self-report, and psychophysiological (pupil dilation) measures were used to assess children’s cognitive performance and cognitive effort. CI children performed worse than NH children in both acoustic conditions. However, no significant effects of acoustic condition (quiet/noise) were observed. Although CI children efficiently compensated for noise in performing the cognitive tasks, their pupil dilation revealed greater cognitive effort in noise than in quiet