Is Silence Normally Better Than Silence?

Most of the studies that we run in the lab silence produces the best performance. But it kind of depends on the task sometimes as well. The main phenomenon is something called the irrelevant sound effect. Where there's lots of overlap to different noise, we have less acoustical variation and we call this steady state sound. And this produces less disruption. So you get what’s called the classic irrelevant sound effect performance on the serial recall task, best performance and quiet.