|
A new study in Psychological Science, a
journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveals
that spending time in nature may be more beneficial for mental
processes than being in urban environments.
Psychologists Marc G. Berman, John Jonides, and
Stephen Kaplan from the University of Michigan designed two
experiments to test how interactions with nature and urban
environments would affect attention and memory processes. First,
a group of volunteers completed a task designed to challenge
memory and attention. The volunteers then took a walk in either
a park or in downtown Ann Arbor. After the walk, volunteers
returned to the lab and were retested on the task. In the second
experiment, after volunteers completed the task, instead of
going out for a walk, they simply viewed either nature
photographs or photographs of urban environments and then
repeated the task.
The results were quite interesting. In the
first experiment, performance on the memory and attention task
greatly improved following the walk in the park, but did not
improve for volunteers who walked downtown. And it is not just
being outside that is beneficial for mental functions - the
group who viewed the nature photographs performed much better on
the retest than the group who looked at city scenes.
The authors suggest that urban environments
provide a relatively complex and often confusing pattern of
stimulation, which requires effort to sort out and interpret.
Natural environments, by contrast, offer a more coherent (and
often more aesthetic) pattern of stimulation that, far from
requiring effort, are often experienced as restful. Thus being
in the context of nature is effortless, permitting us to
replenish our capacity to attend and thus having a restorative
effect on our mental abilities.
|
