The Relationship Between Working Memory Capacity And Auditory Masking

“Cocktail party effect” reflects the phenomenon that human beings can still maintain the ability to talk in noisy environment. At present, the study of the “cocktail party problem” mainly focus on how to use a variety of perceptual cues effectively release informational masking, and what ingredients that informational masking may contains. It is still a mystery that cognitive ability is how to play a role in the process of auditory masking. On the basis of Yang’ study(2011), this study researched how the working memory capacity plays a part in the release of informational masking.This research mainly contains two auditory experiments. Firstly, 85 students of Hebei University were accepted the working memory capacity test, then divided into high working memory capacity and low working memory capacity, 46 of them attended follow-up experiments. Experiment 1 adopted a mixed design of three factors, 2×3×4, investigated under the masking condition of different speech intelligibility, the difference of speech perception between the high working memory capacity and low working memory capacity. Experiment 2 adopted a mixed design of four factors, 2×2×2×4, investigated the difference of cue benefit between the high working memory capacity and low working memory capacity.Results indicated: in the masking of normal meaningless speech, the speech perception scores appears a significantly different between high and low working memory capacity of the individuals. In other words, working memory capacity is associated with the ability to inhibit irrelevant information. Prime consistently supported speech perception. However, with the decrease of the intelligibility of masking sound, only the cue benefit of low working memory capacity of individuals was significantly increased. To summarize, working memory capacity constrains the cognitive processes that depend on abundance resources.This study proved the existence of cognitive informational masking from the perspective of individual difference of working memory capacity, and further revealed how the working memory capacity plays a role in the release of informational masking.