Mark Berman

People really seem to enjoy having curved structure in the environment.

That's right.

One of our major studies where we tested directed attention theory involved bringing people into the laboratory and giving them some objective cognitive tasks to measure their directed attention abilities.

And one of these tasks was called the backwards digit span task.

So participants would hear digits out loud at a pace of about one digit per second.

So four, seven, three.

Four, seven, three.

And the participants would need to repeat those digits back in backwards order.

So three, seven, four.

And we kept increasing the number of digits up to nine digits.

At around five digits, the task gets very difficult.

So participants came to the laboratory.

We gave them this difficult backwards digit span task.

And then we gave them a map that either had them walk backwards

through the Ann Arbor Arboretum.

That was our nature walk.

Or we had them walk through busy downtown Ann Arbor, through busy Washtenaw Avenue.

And then participants returned back to the lab to repeat this backwards digi-span task again.

the main effect was we found that participants improved their ability on this backwards digit span test by about 20% after the walk in nature, but not after the walk in the urban environment.

So they improved by about a digit and a half just after a 50-minute walk.