Abstract
Exposure to urban environments requires more cognitive processing than exposure to nature; an effect that can even be measured analysing gait kinematics whilst people walk towards photographic images. Here, we investigated whether differences in cognitive load between nature and urban scenes are still present when scenes are matched for their liking scores. Participants were exposed to images of nature and urban scenes that had been matched a priori for their liking scores by an independent participant sample (n = 300). Participants (N = 44) were either asked to memorise each image during walking or to rate each image for its visual discomfort after each walk. Irrespective of experimental task, liking score but not environment type predicted gait velocity. Moreover, subjective visual discomfort was predictive of gait velocity. The positive impact of nature described in the literature thus might, at least in part, be due to people’s aesthetic preferences for nature images.
Highlights
Exposure to nature is generally agreed to have a positive impact on many aspects of physical and mental health [1,2,3]
It remains unclear whether cognitive load differences between nature and urban environment types are due to low-level visual features, high-level visual features, attention, semantic associations with image types, differences at the category level, or any kind of interaction between these factors
A non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test of performance values for correctly memorised images revealed that participants remembered significantly more urban (M = 81%) than nature images (M = 70%); Z = -3.083, p < 0.05
Summary
Exposure to nature is generally agreed to have a positive impact on many aspects of physical and mental health [1,2,3]. Even simple exposure to images of nature environments as compared to images of urban environments improves performance on attentional tasks [11, 12] or modulates gait kinematics [13], further supporting the notion that at least some of these beneficial effects of nature are due to processing differences in visual cognition required for the two environments. It remains unclear whether cognitive load differences between nature and urban environment types are due to low-level visual features (such as image statistics), high-level visual features (e.g. objects, larger shapes), attention, semantic associations with image types, differences at the category level (i.e. the environment itself), or any kind of interaction between these factors.
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