Possible Effect of Headphone Usage on Working Memory Among Students in Faculty of Medicine, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria‒Nigeria

Author Info

Isah F.A Muhammad U.A Yusha?u Yusuf

Corresponding Author

Yusha?u Yusuf
Department of Human Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria–Nigeria

A B S T R A C T

Working memory is a system that is responsible for transient holding and processing of new and already stored information. It also involves processing for reasoning, comprehension, learning and memory updating. Headphones are a pair of small loudspeakers that are designed to be held in place close to a user’s ear. They are electroacoustic transducers which convert electrical signals to a corresponding sound in the user’s ear. Several studies have recently shown a link between cognitive abilities and response to hearing aid and signal processing in the brain. Therefore, the relationship between headphone usage among healthy subjects become pertinent. This study is aimed at evaluating the effect of headphone on working memory using N-back task. One hundred (100) participants (55 headphone users and 45 non-headphone user’s) within the age range of 18-31 years were assessed. Participants were instructed to keep in memory, a series of letters and say “target” whenever there was a repetition of letter with exactly one intervening letter and to remain silent when any other letter appeared. The results of this study showed that there was no statistically significant difference in working memory between headphone and non-headphone users with p>0.05. In conclusion, this study revealed headphone use has no effect on working memory of the participants subjected to N–back test.

Article Info

Article Type

Research Article

Publication history

Received: Thu 13, Jun 2019
Accepted: Tue 25, Jun 2019
Published: Sat 20, Jul 2019

Copyright

© 2023 Yusha?u Yusuf. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hosting by Science Repository.
DOI: 10.31487/j.NNB.2019.02.02