Year: 2014
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Attention Restoration Theory (Kaplan, 1995; Kaplan & Berman, 2010) proposes that natural surroundings “restore” attentional resources, in comparison to urban surroundings. This is due to increased bottom-up processing in natural environments (relative to urban environments) that allows top-down processes to recuperate. The predicted performance benefits of interacting with nature can occur when individuals simply view scenes of nature and this was investigated using the change blindness paradigm. Participants viewed twenty scenes of nature and completed a change detection task, and twenty urban scenes followed by a change detection task (the order of blocks was counterbalanced). To ensure any difference in change detection was due to attention restoration and not from any improvement in mood, participants were asked to complete a mood questionnaire after each block. The results showed that change blindness did not vary according to the scenes participants viewed prior to the task, and also that mood did not change across the experiment. However, when accounting for responses to the mood questionnaire, nature scenes improved change blindness (therefore restoring attention resources), but only when participants reported low negative affect. Attention restoration may therefore be influenced by an individual’s internal emotional state.
Authors: Catherine Thompson, Rca Bendall
Language: English
Topic: Urban Green Space and Health
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1822695426