To what extent are cognitive processes rooted in “simple” body-environment interactions, and thesituation in which they take place? And to what extent does the body-environment interactiondepend on socio-cultural processes?Questions like these are pertinent to the field of environmental psychology, especially attentionrestoration theory (ART) (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Kaplan, 1995). Here, concrete natureexperiences are believed to incur certain attentional and cognitive states in the individual.Proponents of ART argue that self-regulation (Kaplan and Berman, 2010) and executivefunctioning involved in advanced cognitive operations like working memory, cognitive flexibilityand attentional control (Diamond, 2013) gains from exposure to green environments. Recentmeta analyses have pointed more specifically to the restoration of the system supporting so-calleddirected attention (Ohly et al., 2016; Stevenson et al., 2018).The assumption is that the particular materiality of nature, e.g., the sounds, colors, and diversity(Fuller et al., 2007; Ratcliffe et al., 2013; Ossola and Niemel?, 2018), taps into our effortless stimulusdependent attention at the expense of the directed (e.g., voluntary, sustained) attention we need ingoal-directed tasks (e.g., Schilhab et al., 2018).
展开▼
