Cognitive Strategies and Natural Environments Interact in Influencing Executive Function.

Stefan C. Bourrier,James T. Enns,Marc G. Berman

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01248

Abstract

Exposure to natural environments and the adoption of specific cognitive strategies are each claimed to have a direct influence on executive mental functioning. Here we manipulate both factors to help determine whether they draw on common cognitive resources. Three experiments investigated links between environmental effects (nature vs. urban video tours) and strategic effects (active vs. passive instructional approaches to the task). Each experiment used a pretest-posttest design and assessed executive mental functioning using a backward digit span task and Raven's progressive matrices. Experiment 1 manipulated participants' cognitive strategy through explicit instructions in order to establish a link between cognitive strategy and executive mental functioning. Experiment 2 used a pair of 10-min video tours (urban, nature) to examine the relationship between environmental exposure and executive mental function on the same tasks, replicating previous findings with the backward digit span task and extended them to a new task (i.e., Raven's progressive matrices). In Experiment 3, these two manipulations were combined to explore the relations between them. The results showed that the nature video tour attenuated the influence of task instructions relative to the urban video tour. An interaction between environmental video exposure and cognitive strategy was found, in that effects of cognitive strategy on executive function were smaller in the nature video condition than in the urban video condition. This suggests that brief exposure to nature had a direct positive influence on executive mental functioning.

Highlights

The past decade has seen considerable interest in the relations between the natural environment and human cognition (Kaplan and Berman, 2010; Bratman et al, 2015; Dadvand et al, 2015; Kabisch et al, 2015)
Many of these studies report differential effects on a particular cognitive task, the backward digit span task, which is a popular measure in the literature on executive functioning
Because the raw scores of the two tasks were based on different scales, we used z-scores to compare performance across the two tasks and in combination. These z-scores were derived by subtracting the group mean for each task from the participant’s raw score for that task, and dividing this difference by the group standard deviation for the same task

Summary

Introduction

The past decade has seen considerable interest in the relations between the natural environment and human cognition (Kaplan and Berman, 2010; Bratman et al, 2015; Dadvand et al, 2015; Kabisch et al, 2015). The primary support for this claim comes from many studies (Bodin and Hartig, 2003; Cimprich and Ronis, 2003; Stark, 2003; Berman et al, 2008, 2012; Perkins et al, 2011; Emfield and Neider, 2014; Gamble et al, 2014; Lin et al, 2014; Bratman et al, 2015; Rogerson and Barton, 2015; Gidlow et al, 2016; Li and Sullivan, 2016; Triguero-Mas et al, 2017) reporting a link between executive functioning and exposure to natural vs built environments (via walks, videos, and still photos) Many of these studies report differential effects on a particular cognitive task, the backward digit span task, which is a popular measure in the literature on executive functioning

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