Abstract
Nature exposure can provide benefits on stress, health and cognitive performance. According to Attention Restoration Theory (ART), the positive impact of nature on cognition is mainly driven by fascination. Fascinating properties of nature such as water or a winding hiking trail may capture involuntary attention, allowing the directed form of attention to rest and to recover. This claim has been supported by studies relying on eye-tracking measures of attention deployment, comparing exposure to urban and nature settings. Yet, recent studies have shown that promoting higher engagement with a nature setting can improve restorative benefits, hence challenging ART’s view that voluntary attention is resting. Besides, recent evidence published by Szolosi et al. (2014) suggests that voluntary attention may be involved during exposure to high-mystery nature images which they showed as having greater potential for attention restoration. The current study explored how exposure to nature images of different scenic qualities in mystery (and restoration potential) could impact the engagement of attention. To do so, participants were shown nature images characterized by either low or high mystery properties (with allegedly low or high restoration potential, respectively) and were asked to evaluate their fascination and aesthetic levels. Concurrently, an eye tracker collected measures of pupil size, fixations and spontaneous blinks as indices of attentional engagement. Results showed that high-mystery nature images had higher engagement than low-mystery images as supported by the larger pupil dilations, the higher number of fixations and the reduced number of blinks and durations of fixations. Taken together, these results challenge ART’s view that directed attention is merely resting during exposure to restorative nature and offer new hypotheses on potential mechanisms underlying attention restoration.
Highlights
With the omnipresence of technology and the high prevalence of urban or suburban life, nature exposure has significantly decreased over the last few decades
Participants who were asked to actively engage during their walk showed reduced commissions errors on the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) at post-test. These results strongly suggest that superior engagement and deployment of voluntary attention toward the restorative setting might be better for attention restoration
The goal of the current study was to follow-up on Szolosi et al (2014) study by exploring how voluntary attention could be deployed while being exposed to nature images of different mystery levels, with presumably different potential for restoration
Summary
With the omnipresence of technology and the high prevalence of urban or suburban life, nature exposure has significantly decreased over the last few decades. Literature has, shown that nature exerts many positive impacts, including benefits for health (Bowler et al, 2010; Twohig-Bennett and Jones, 2018), affects (McMahan and Estes, 2015), stress (Hunter et al, 2019; Yin et al, 2020) and even cognition (Ohly et al, 2016; Stevenson et al, 2018). Considering the high demands known to incur from technology usage, multitasking and other daily life challenges, nature’s positive effect on cognition can be useful to reduce fatigue or depletion. Such effects have been observed through lab and outdoor experiments, often relying on pre-post interventions to assess the potential recovery effects of nature on executive attention. Benefits have been observed on many cognitive activities including but not limited to creative problem solving (Atchley et al, 2012), working memory (Shin et al, 2011; Berman et al, 2012), inhibitory control of competing stimuli (Berman et al, 2008; Chung et al, 2018) and sustained attention (Berto, 2005; Pasanen et al, 2018)
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