Abstract
Adults and children are spending more time interacting with media and technology and less time participating in activities in nature. This life-style change clearly has ramifications for our physical well-being, but what impact does this change have on cognition? Higher order cognitive functions including selective attention, problem solving, inhibition, and multi-tasking are all heavily utilized in our modern technology-rich society. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) suggests that exposure to nature can restore prefrontal cortex-mediated executive processes such as these. Consistent with ART, research indicates that exposure to natural settings seems to replenish some, lower-level modules of the executive attentional system. However, the impact of nature on higher-level tasks such as creative problem solving has not been explored. Here we show that four days of immersion in nature, and the corresponding disconnection from multi-media and technology, increases performance on a creativity, problem-solving task by a full 50% in a group of naive hikers. Our results demonstrate that there is a cognitive advantage to be realized if we spend time immersed in a natural setting. We anticipate that this advantage comes from an increase in exposure to natural stimuli that are both emotionally positive and low-arousing and a corresponding decrease in exposure to attention demanding technology, which regularly requires that we attend to sudden events, switch amongst tasks, maintain task goals, and inhibit irrelevant actions or cognitions. A limitation of the current research is the inability to determine if the effects are due to an increased exposure to nature, a decreased exposure to technology, or to other factors associated with spending three days immersed in nature.
Highlights
Our environment plays a critical role in how we think and behave
The current study is unique in that participants were exposed to nature over a sustained period and they were still in that natural setting during testing
Despite the challenging testing environment, the current research indicates that there is a real, measurable cognitive advantage to be realized if we spend time truly immersed in a natural setting
Summary
Our environment plays a critical role in how we think and behave. The modern environment experienced by most individuals living in urban or suburban settings can be characterized by a dramatic decrease in our exposure to natural settings and a correlated increase in exposure to a technology intense environment. Data suggest that children today spend only 15–25 minutes a day in outdoor play and sports [1] and this number continues to decline. Eighty percent of kindergarten aged children are computer users (USDE, 2005) and the average 8–18 year old spends over seven and a half hours per day using one or more types of media (TV, cell phones, computers) [3], while adults likely spend more time engaged with different forms of media technology (for example see OFCOM Communications Market Report) [4]. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) [5] suggests that nature has specific restorative effects on the prefrontal cortex-mediated executive attentional system, which can become depleted with overuse. ART suggests that interactions with nature are effective in replenishing depleted attentional resources
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