Abstract
Brain activation within, and psychophysiologic interaction between, significantly activated regions in the brain obtained from a phonological working memory experiment on a single participant were studied. The study objectives were to determine the areas that respond significantly to a phonological working memory task and to investigate the influence of babble noise on their activation and the psychophysiologic interactions (PPI) between the source region and those activated areas. Three conditions were used during functional magnetic resonance imaging scans which were working memory in quiet (WMQ), working memory in noise (WMN) and listening to babble noise. Both the WMQ and WMN conditions resulted in similar activated regions in the brain but with a higher number of activated voxels during WMQ for the right hemispheric areas in association with the working memory task. This is supported by the PPI results that performing the working memory task is less influenced by noise for that particular brain region.