# Investigating the impact of background noise on collaborative decision-making using an individual-weighted voting model

## TL;DR

This study explores how background noise affects group decision-making by using a model to quantify how individuals influence each other's decisions.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a model-based approach to measure the impact of background noise on collaborative decision-making and interpersonal information exchange.

## Key findings

- Background noise significantly alters how participants influence each other’s decisions.
- The model successfully quantifies relative influence among group members using derived statistics.
- The methodology offers a new tool for assessing communication challenges like noise and hearing loss.

## Abstract

The development and evaluation of hearing rehabilitation strategies would greatly benefit from quantification of theoretical constructs related to communication success. Motivated by this, we present a model-based approach to analyze information exchange in a collaborative general knowledge decision-making task. Through a combination of experiments and simulations, we investigate how this model can be used to quantify the exchange of information between interlocutors. Experiments were conducted with ten triads (N = 30) to examine the impact of loud background noise on decision-making in collaborating triads. The group discussions took place in two different levels of background noise, 48dB and 78dB. An existing model of joint decision-making was extended to fit cases where decisions are made individually after engaging in a collaborative discussion. A maximum likelihood estimator for the model was derived and validated in terms of parameter recovery and sensitivity to participant response bias and was used to quantify the relative influence of group members on each other’s post-discussion decisions, formalized as a set of model weights. Four statistics were used to summarize the results: overall weight change, self-weighting, weight equality, and weight similarity. Background noise was found to significantly alter how participants influenced each other’s decisions, but the direction of change remained unclear. These findings demonstrate how group members’ influence on each other’s decisions can be quantified and suggest that loud background noise can have a tangible impact on how group decisions are formed.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s41235-026-00710-4.

Conceptualizing and measuring communication success is crucial for evaluating hearing interventions, as many hearing-impaired individuals struggle in interactive communication settings. However, no established methods exist to directly assess communication success in the context of hearing impairment and intervention. This is arguably due to the elusive nature of this concept; communication success is highly dependent on context and subjectively determined objectives. Nonetheless, one broad conceptual category which encapsulates many everyday communication scenarios is exchange of information. In this study, we adapt an existing model of joint decision-making to operationalize interpersonal exchange of information in groups of arbitrary sizes. We apply this model to an experiment conducted in an environment which is known to make communication difficult—namely, in the presence of loud background noise. We illustrate how the model can reveal changes in the ways in which information is exchanged between interlocutors and confirm that noise does indeed impact information exchange. We illustrate how the model can also be used to make inferences about individuals’ propensity to absorb information from their interlocutors. This methodology offers a new tool for assessing the consequences of communicative inhibitions, such as noise, hearing loss, language proficiency, or speech disabilities. In the context of hearing impairment, this could provide new insights and evaluation criteria which go beyond traditional passive listening tests.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s41235-026-00710-4.