The findings on performance attributions associated with environmental conditions may offer some intriguing insights into the comprehension and mood findings. Contrary to predictions, adult students in the reading condition were more apt to report sound as negatively impacting performance. However, these participants also demonstrated the most positive performance levels in the study, with participants in the OCZ reading condition actually having the highest mean level of performance. Research on arousal and task difficulty in studies of noise suggest that at lower levels of task difficulty, slight environmental stressors leading to higher levels of arousal may improve performance. However, the lack of main effect for modality for negative affect or an interaction between modality and environment for negative affect, coupled with the weak, non-significant relationships between negative affect and performance does not support the notion that adult stu- dents in the reading condition experienced higher levels of negative affect that may have contributed to better performance. Predictive relationships were not examined in this study due to design choices. An alternative explanation may be that adult students in the reading condition either perceived the task as more difficult than those in the listening condition or perhaps had greater psychological in- vestment in the task, leading them to attribute possible poor performance to an external source in an effort to defend against vulnerabilities to their self-concept. Relationships amongst performance attributions, task difficulty, motivational variables, and the built environment should be explored in future research.