Abstract
The fact that the illuminance of LED lights affects human attention and long-term memory has been verified through various studies, but there are no consistent research results about what level of illuminance is effective. The aims of this study were to systematically verify the effects of LED lighting on attention and long-term memory. The experiment was designed with four illuminance levels—300 lx, 400 lx, 500 lx, and 1,000 lx—as experimental conditions to determine the effects of LED lights on attention and long-term memory. Participants in the experiment were 18 college students. The attention task was performed using a handmade attention measuring instrument. Long-term memory was measured by the word fragment completion (hereinafter, referred to as “WFC”) task on the memory retention volume of the learning task that was learned exactly 24 hours before. Of the total 20 tasks, the ratio of correctly retrieval tasks was used as a dependent variable. As a result, attention showed the highest performance with a mean performance of 19.39 (SD = 3.78) at 1,000 lx. A statistically significant difference was also found between the 1,000 lx and 300 lx conditions (p=0.01). On the contrary, long-term memory showed the highest retrieval rate at an average of 58.06% (SD = 22.57) at 400 lx, and long-term memory performance was better in the order of 500 lx (mean = 48.89, SD = 20.33), 1,000 lx (mean = 45.83, SD = 23.53), and 300 lx (Mean = 43.33, SD = 19.10). Statistically, there was a significant difference between 300 lx and 400 lx (p=0.01), 400 lx and 1,000 lx (p=0.01). Through this study, it was verified that the effects of attention and long-term memory are different according to the illuminance of LED lighting, and these results can be important data to clarify the influence of light on human memory in the future.
Highlights
Light affects the 24-h circadian rhythm and is accepted as the main cause of activity and acute alerting [1, 2]
Research findings on the effects of light have not always been consistent. ough some studies have suggested that a relatively bright light produces psychological alertness and that the effect leads to improved attention and cognitive performance, other studies have failed to find improved cognitive performance or have even found lower performance in the bright light condition [9,10,11]
Sustained attention did not show any significant difference in both bright light and dim light conditions [12]. is inconsistent aspect of the light effect can cause a lot of confusion in the use of light in real scenes
Summary
Light affects the 24-h circadian rhythm and is accepted as the main cause of activity and acute alerting [1, 2]. Campbell and Dawson [13] studied the effect of ambient light on alertness and cognitive performance in night workers and set the three illuminance conditions of 10∼20 lx, 100 lx, and 1,000 lx as experimental conditions. The above studies may be meaningful in that they searched that bright light conditions have a positive aspect to alertness and cognitive performance compared to dim conditions, but there clearly was a limit in drawing conclusions as to which illuminance has a positive effect on the actual scene. Us, this study was performed to systematically verify the differences between attention and long-term memory aspects by supplementing the limitations of previous studies Under this objective, first, the study reverified the previous studies and designed the experiment using a greater spectrum of illuminance than the bright-dim binominal design to determine the optimal illuminance to use in real-life settings. The study included measurements of both attention and long-term memory to gain clear understanding of the performance difference between attention and long-term memory according to illuminance
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