Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Attention is a limited resource that can become depleted after extensive usage. Exposure to nature stimuli can help recover attention depletion. More precisely, nature (vs. urban) benefits have been reported for working memory, attention control and cognitive flexibility, although these effects are the subject of debate. This study aims at assessing whether nature can help reduce cognitive fatigue as a consequence of attention depletion. Participants performed a pretest working memory and attention control task. Then, they went through a cognitive fatigue task, followed by exposure to either nature or urban images, and a posttest consisting of the pretest measures. Measures of subjective fatigue were also collected throughout the study. Pre- vs. posttest cognitive performance comparisons failed to raise differences across conditions. Yet, subjective fatigue was significantly improved by the nature intervention but not by the urban intervention. Results are discussed in terms of nature’s positive impact on subjective experience.