Looking at nature can lower your brain's load

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-01-06 11:01

International

Compared to looking at urban landscapes, looking at nature scenes, even for a short time, can lower your brain's cognitive load and even help you walk quicker, according to UK research. The study placed people in front of either city or nature scenes and measured their ability to perform a shape discrimination task or walk on a treadmill. The study found that walking speed and step length decreased in front of urban as compared to nature scenes. It also found that shape discrimination was slower in front of urban scenes, suggesting that it is harder to disengage attention from urban scenes than from nature scenes. The authors say this shows that the cognitive impacts of sustained exposure to nature versus urban scenes can be seen in real-time.

News release

From: The Royal Society

The nature effect in motion: visual exposure to environmental scenes impacts cognitive load and human gait kinematics

It is generally accepted that spending time in nature such as a park has restorative properties exceeding those seen for spending time in an urban environment. Yet, it remains unclear what exactly it is in an environment that produces this benefit. We explored the moment-to-moment impact of environment type on cognitive processing load, measuring changes in people’s gait and reaction times. Even short visual exposure to urban scenes lead to increased cognitive load and slower gait as compared to exposure to nature scenes. Gait measures thus provide us with a new powerful tool to quantify an environment’s cognitive demands.

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Research The Royal Society, Web page Please link to the article in online versions of your report (the URL will go live after the embargo ends).

Journal/
conference: Royal Society Open Science

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Bristol, UK

Funder: Work in the BVI movement laboratory was supported by the Wellcome Trust (WT089367AIA). D.B. is supported by a PhD studentship from the Faculty of Science, University of Bristol.

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