Madrid
Updated:06/02/2022 20:00h
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Noise from road traffic is a widespread problem in cities and towns. evidence on its consequences on the health of boys and girls are still scarce. Now, a study carried out in 38 schools in Barcelona has suggested that traffic noise in schools has a detrimental effect on the development of working memory and the attention span of primary school students. The results of this research led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a center promoted by the »la Caixa» Foundation, have been published in the journal «PLoS Medicine».
The study, framed in the project Breatheand led by researchers Maria Foraster and Jordi Sunyerwas attended by 2,680 boys and girls between seven and ten year old.
In order to assess the potential impact of traffic noise on cognitive development, the scientific team focused on two skills that develop rapidly in preadolescence and are essential for learning and school performance: attention span and working memory.
Attention span makes it possible for us to attend to specific stimuli selectively or to focus on a specific task for long periods of time, among other processes. Working memory or operative memory is the system that allows us to maintain and manipulate information in short periods of time. When, in addition, it is necessary to continuously and efficiently process the information stored in the working memory, we speak of complex working memory.
The field work lasted for 12 months between the years 2012 and 2013, during which the participants performed the cognitive tests four times. The objective of these tests was not only to evaluate working memory and attention span, but also to study their evolution over time. In parallel, noise measurements were made both outside the 38 participating schoolsas in the courtyards and inside the classrooms.
The results show that, after the year of study, the progression of working memory, complex working memory and attention span was slower in male and female students who attended schools with higher traffic noise. For example, a 5 dB increase in outside noise levels resulted in 11.4% slower than average working memory development and 23.5% slower complex working memory development to the middle Likewise, exposure to an additional 5 dB of outside traffic noise resulted in 4.8% slower development of attention span than average.
Differences between inside and outside
In the analysis of external noise, both a higher average noise level and a greater fluctuation in noise levels in the school were associated with a worse evolution in the results of the students in all the tests. Inside classrooms, a greater fluctuation in noise levels was also associated with a slower progression over a year on all cognitive tests. In contrast, children exposed to higher mean classroom noise levels over the year only performed worse than students in quieter classrooms on the attention span test, but not on the working memory tests.
“This result suggests that noise spikes inside the classroom they could be more disruptive for neurodevelopment than the average decibel. This is important, because it reinforces the hypothesis that noise characteristics may have more influence than its average levels, when currently policies are only based on average decibels”, explains Maria Foraster, researcher at ISGlobal and first author of the study.
“Our study reinforces the hypothesis that childhood is a vulnerable period in which external stimuli such as noise can affect the rapid process of cognitive development that takes place before adolescence,” explains Jordi Sunyer, ISGlobal researcher and last author of the study. study.
Noise in the home
Starting from the road traffic noise map of the city of Barcelona for the year 2012, the team estimated the average noise levels in the home of each participant. However, in this case, no relationship was observed between noise in the place of residence and cognitive development.
“This could be because exposure to noise at school is more detrimental because it affects vulnerable windows of concentration and learning processes. On the other hand, while noise measurements were made in schools, estimates were made in homes based on a noise map that could be less precise and that only reflected the noise outside, something that could also have influenced in the results”, points out Maria Foraster.
This study extends the evidence in relation to the effects of transportation on the child cognitive developmentwhich to date had been observed for schools exposed to aircraft noise and also for schools exposed to atmospheric pollution from road traffic. The scientific team stresses the need for new studies on the traffic noise shot in other towns to determine if these first results can be extrapolated to other cities and contexts.
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