title: Creativity in the wild: improving creative reasoning through immersion in natural settings.
abstract: Adults and children are spending more time interacting with media and technology and less time participating in activities in nature. This life-style change clearly has ramifications for our physical well-being, but what impact does this change have on cognition? Higher order cognitive functions including selective attention, problem solving, inhibition, and multi-tasking are all heavily utilized in our modern technology-rich society. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) suggests that exposure to nature can restore prefrontal cortex-mediated executive processes such as these. Consistent with ART, research indicates that exposure to natural settings seems to replenish some, lower-level modules of the executive attentional system. However, the impact of nature on higher-level tasks such as creative problem solving has not been explored. Here we show that four days of immersion in nature, and the corresponding disconnection from multi-media and technology, increases performance on a creativity, problem-solving task by a full 50% in a group of naive hikers. Our results demonstrate that there is a cognitive advantage to be realized if we spend time immersed in a natural setting. We anticipate that this advantage comes from an increase in exposure to natural stimuli that are both emotionally positive and low-arousing and a corresponding decrease in exposure to attention demanding technology, which regularly requires that we attend to sudden events, switch amongst tasks, maintain task goals, and inhibit irrelevant actions or cognitions. A limitation of the current research is the inability to determine if the effects are due to an increased exposure to nature, a decreased exposure to technology, or to other factors associated with spending three days immersed in nature.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, USA.
authors.forename: Ruth Ann
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Atchley
authors.forename: David L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Strayer
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Atchley
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003405:Creativity; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D055814:Wilderness