Annoyance and memory performance in the presence of wind turbine sound

Garcia-Guerrero, Santiago, Manohare, Manish, O'Hora, Denis, & King, Eoin A. (2025). Annoyance and memory performance in the presence of wind turbine sound. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 105, 102653. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2025.102653

Abstract

Wind energy is a critical component in the clean energy transition and the acceptance of wind turbines depends on understanding the impacts of wind turbines on local communities. There is concern that wind turbine sound may affect the health of local residents. One vector through which sound can affect the human body is via the induction of neural frequencies that compete with endogenous and task-specific frequencies. The current study assessed the effects of concurrent wind turbine sound on memory performance to investigate such effects. 46 participants each completed 304 memory trials under varying conditions of wind-turbine sound. Participants performed as expected in the memory task, with greater memory load reducing recognition accuracy, but there were no effects of wind turbine sound properties on performance. Subjective annoyance by wind turbine sound was low, but it was consistently related to acoustic properties of the sound samples, specifically loudness, sharpness, roughness and fluctuation strength. Annoyance by wind turbine sound slightly increased during the task suggesting prolonged exposure may contribute to an accumulation of annoyance over time. Annoyance did not affect memory performance. The current findings support the position that wind turbine noise may induce annoyance, but they do not support the position that wind turbine noise interferes with healthy human brain function.

Publisher

Elsevier

Rights

Attribution 4.0 International

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Collections

School of Psychology (Scholarly Articles)