Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature

The article describes the much-speculated notion or theory by philosophers, of therapy that has totally no side effects, that is, interacting with nature. It explains how nature can be used to improve a person’s attention by taking into consideration the different environments the subjects are based. The article makes conclusions basing on two experiments conducted. The Attention Restoration Theory (ART) is based on collected information that was inspired by previous research on both involuntary and voluntary attention.
The first experiment was using a backward digit-span task to measure the effect of the urban areas and nature on cognitive performance. The experiment used subjects averaging at 22.62 years of age and 23 of the being female and 15 being male to come up with their conclusions. They concluded that walking in nature indeed improved performance as compared to those who walked downtown. They affirmed their test by redoing the test using Analysis of variance (ANOVA) where tests were done before and after exposure to the environment, and the results were seemingly on par with the initial experiment results. From the participants’ response favoring the walk, the test proved the positive impact of environment on voluntary or directed attention.
The second experiment was to use ART to confirm the prediction that, nature interaction only influenced the executive attention compared to the both orienting and alerting. This test was done using Attention Network Test(ANT), where test subjects were four male students and eight girls averaging at 24.

25 years of age. The results of the experiment ascertained that the prediction held with influence only being on the executive functions. There was also a substantial improvement in the performance is seen when subjects were shown pictures of nature and those of urban areas.
The two experiments, therefore, indicated positive results for the patients in directed attention, and this led to the conclusion that, nature had the ability to restore the voluntary attention of an individual. This was proved by the correlation between the perception of the subjects regarding nature and the improvement in performance illustrated by the experiments.