The Inhibition of Return (IOR) is an orienting mechanism to visual or auditory stimuli. It facilitates visual search in crowded scenes by inhibiting inspection of previously searched locations and promote inspection of previously unsearched locations (Klein, 2000). In general, the reaction time (RT) toward a target is fast when the interval between cue and target is short and slow when the interval between cue and target is long. IOR is identified by the crossover point of the RT towards cued and un-cued targets. Aging (Madden, 2007), stressors (Yu et al., 2015), and auditory stimuli (Tang et al., 2021; He et al., 2023) modulate performance in visual search paradigms. In the present study, we quantified error rates (ER) and RTs for a visual search paradigm in dependence of different background sounds (silence, bird song, construction noise) in 71 adults.Using a 5-factor ANOVA with post-hoc tests revealed differences in performance in relation to the type of background sound. Surprisingly, participants responded faster to targets when exposed to construction noise. Log transformed RT regressed to arcsine transformed ER when participants performed the visual search either in silence or when bird singing and chirping was used as background sound. These analyses showed that RT increased with ER. When construction noise was used, RT did not regress to ER. Since participants were exposed to background sound only about ten minutes, construction noise may have increased attention for this short period of time and, consequently, increased performance.