The restorative benefits of nature have been found in varied populations, from college students ( Tennessen & Cimprich, 1995) to groups suffering from impaired attention, such as women with breast cancer ( Cimprich, 1993) and children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ( Faber Taylor & Kuo, 2009). Nature has been shown to reduce stress in participants who have been experimentally stressed ( Ulrich, et al., 1991), as well as to reduce recovery time from gall bladder removal surgery ( Ulrich, 1984), and to improve attentional capacity in women recovering from breast cancer surgery ( Cimprich & Ronis, 2003). Kaplan & Berman, 2010).Ī range of evidence supports the Attention Restoration Theory. An urban environment, according to Kaplan, may also capture our involuntary attention, but does so with less inherently appealing stimuli, such as police sirens, thus requiring people to use effortful top-down, directed attention, to overcome these stimuli and re-focus their attention ( S. It must: (1) be fascinating, effortlessly capturing attention in a bottom-up manner (2) provide a feeling of being away, allowing the mind to wander from daily stresses (3) be extensive, providing a desire to explore more of the environment and (4) be compatible with one’s desires or needs, providing opportunities to take part in enjoyable activities. He argues that a natural environment must meet four criteria to be restorative. Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory proposes further, that in capturing involuntary attention, nature permits fatigued directed attention to rest and be restored. The present study is the first to investigate whether this Nature Effect occurs in healthy older adults as well, an important question because executive attention is essential for everyday life and independent living ( Banich, 2009).īuilding upon the theories of William James, Kaplan posits that there are two kinds of attention, directed and involuntary, and that nature captures our involuntary attention in a bottom-up, stimulus-driven manner ( S. Kaplan, 1995) has shown that brief exposure to nature scenes improves executive attention in young adults ( Berman, Jonides, & Kaplan, 2008). Research inspired by Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory ( S. Natural environments are not only preferred to more urban environments, but time in nature has psychological benefits, too, such as increasing people’s positive outlook and psychological energy ( R. For example, Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed Central Park, created places of respite in urban areas to induce, “refreshing rest and invigoration to the whole system” (c.f. Department of the Interior.Nature has been a means of escape from the stresses of the city for centuries. The MIT study was supported by a National Science Foundation grant and the U.S. “Images that are slightly uncanny or alter our expectations will stick.” The study also said images can be memorable if they feature an unexpected element, which makes sense,” she said. I noticed a lot of the images they classified as memorable feature the colour red. “I also think colour and composition have something to do with it. When there is eye contact, that sense of interaction is stronger and therefore there’s something that embeds itself in your memory,” she said, adding that, in her experience, images that ‘speak’ to the viewer emotionally are also usually more memorable. “When we have a human figure or person, we have contact recognition. Izabela Pluta, a lecturer in photomedia in the School of Media Arts at the College of Fine Arts, said the discovery could also have applications for companies that want to identify memorable images for marketing purposes. The results were developed into an algorithm that can predict the memorability of images and could be used by book publishers, photo editors or smart phone photo app developers, the researchers said. The images most likely to be forgotten were those landscape scenes without humans in them, while people shots were more likely to be remembered. They were asked to press a key on their keyboard when an image appeared that they had already seen.
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