Working With Environmental Noise and Noise-Cancelation: A Workload Assessment With EEG and Subjective Measures.

As working and learning environments become open and flexible, people are also potentially surrounded by ambient noise, which causes an increase in mental workload. The present study uses electroencephalogram (EEG) and subjective measures to investigate if noise-canceling technologies can fade out external distractions and free up mental resources. Therefore, participants had to solve spoken arithmetic tasks that were read out via headphones in three sound environments: a quiet environment (), a noisy environment (), and a noisy environment but with active noise-canceling headphones ().