Abstract:

The physical characteristics of the classroom influence the cognitive processes of students. A critical case is the university context, due to the high demands on performance, particularly in terms of attention and memory performance. One of the variables that is most likely to affect these performances is noise. This mainly comes from two sources: external (mainly traffic, in classrooms adjacent to roads) and internal (mainly the operation of the building itself, in classrooms adjacent to circulation areas). The starting hypothesis of this study is that different sources and levels of noise may affect students' performance differently. Hence, the main objective was to quantify the effect on attention and memory of external and internal noise in university classrooms. To quantify this, a laboratory field study was conducted using virtual reality (with visual and auditory simulation). 120 subjects, all of them university students, participated. They performed psychological tasks to quantify performance in attention (to react as quickly as possible to auditory stimuli) and memory (remembering as many words as possible from an auditory list) while being exposed to different simulations of noise university classroom situations. Six situations were studied, which resulted from combining external and internal noise, both with low (44 dBA), medium (54 dBA) and high (64 dBA) intensities. Analyses indicate that both source and intensity affects attention and memory differently. These results may be of interest to researchers involved in the acoustics of university spaces as well as to teachers and those responsible for these spaces.

Keywords:

Classroom design, attention, memory, virtual reality, neuroarchitecture.