Environmental sounds impact memory: Effects of city-related and nature-related sounds on episodic memory

Abstract

Research from a broad range of scientific disciplines suggests that aspects of city environments, such as city-related sounds, are associated with poor health and cognitive outcomes, whereas aspects of natural environments are associated with positive outcomes. Strikingly, essentially, no experimental work has examined effects of city- as well as nature-related sound exposure on episodic memory, which is surprising given that people often live in sound-exposed environments. We examine the effect of city-related sounds, nature-related sounds, and white noise (control) sounds on both item memory (i.e., memory for studied materials) as well as context memory (i.e., memory for episodic details associated with studied items) to gain a richer understanding of the effects of different environmental sounds on episodic memory. Results showed that exposure to the different sound conditions (city-related, nature-related) had no effect on item memory; however, exposure to city-related sounds significantly reduced context memory compared to both the nature-related and white noise (control) conditions, implying a cost to episodic memory from exposure to city-related sounds. These results imply that exposure to city-related sounds leads to reduced ability to form detail-rich memories, which builds on existing work suggesting city-related sound exposure harms aspects of health and cognition.