A window on nature may improve our mood at work, but probably doesn't help our attention.
If you work from 8am to 6pm in a windowless room, The Back Page has some good news and some bad news.
Having toiled for many years pre-TMR in a newsroom so vast it was several minutes’ walk from her desk to the nearest window, your correspondent loves having an openable window right by her desk. Natural light, air and being able to rest your eyes on greenery amid all the screen time – there is a lot to love.
It turns out there is a wealth of theory and evidence for window views of nature reducing stress and improving mood, which makes intuitive sense given where we evolved.
There is mixed evidence for what views can do for your cognitive performance and creativity, however: while some studies find enhancement, others find the opposite, suggesting views are distracting.
A team from Bond University in Queensland set out to investigate the effect of views on attention and creativity as well as on positive and negative affect in this study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
In one experiment they tested participants for tonic alertness (sustained attention), and creativity while wearing a VR headset showing either a windowless room or a window view of nature. In a second experiment they added a third VR condition, a shuttered window with light coming through but no view, and tested participants for phasic alertness (short-term arousal in response to stimulus), higher-level executive attention (working memory) and affect.
If it seems odd to use artificial representations of nature when testing subjects’ response to nature, they justify this by saying VR is already a validated tool for such purposes. It was necessary for consistency and “to enable a high degree of immersiveness and environmental control, but at a low cost. I.e. creating real-life environments and experimentally manipulating a single feature while keeping all other features identical would be logistically challenging.” Still …
The results were an interesting mix.
Subjects with a view also reported more positive mood and less negative mood. (That’s the bad news we referred to at the top.)
Alertness and higher executive function, however, was the same in the view and no-view groups. (That’s the good news. A nice sweeping natural vista outside your practice window probably wouldn’t make you better at your job.)
On creativity, subjects produced more answers on a task when looking at nature views than not, but the quality of their answers were judged to be no better. (TMR readers, we assume you’re not looking to be more creative in your jobs, so we’ll call that neutral news.)
Lead researcher Dr Oliver Baumann, a cognitive neuroscientist, said the results could help inform urban planning. He also said bosses of the future might be able to tailor individual workstations to get the best from employees by analysing their work, personality and cognitive profile – which makes us think Dr Baumann hasn’t met too many bosses of the present.
But in a world where humans in industrialised nations reportedly spend about 90% of their time indoors, it’s worth knowing that the sight of trees can make us, if not better at what we’re doing, at least a bit happier while we’re doing it.
If you’re looking at something particularly pleasant and calming, send a pic to penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.
