Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Publication Date
Spring 5-2022
Journal
Undergraduate Honours Theses
Abstract
Exposure to nature has evidently been shown to benefit affective states and improve cognitive performance. Due to the predominant focus on the influence of immersive environments on restoration in prior research, the current study aimed to examine the extent to which nature-related benefits are linked to perceptual richness. The study consisted of 204 participants, recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants were randomly assigned to listen to either unaltered nature sounds, unaltered urban sounds, degraded nature sounds, or degraded urban sounds. Participants completed the Auditory N-Back task, self-reported fatigue levels, and provided mood ratings prior to and after listening to the assigned sounds. The Perceived Restorativeness Scale and Mental Bandwidth Scale were completed towards the end of the study to measure the extent to which participants found the sounds to be restorative. The results of the study indicate that nature sounds improve mood (increasing happiness and calmness and decreasing anxiety) regardless of sound quality. Listening to unaltered nature sounds were found to increase cognitive performance, whereas unaltered urban sounds decreased performance. Exposure to degraded sounds, in contrast, led to a weak increase in performance for both nature and urban sounds, suggesting that perceptually rich nature sounds may be required to observe a significant improvement in cognitive performance. The findings of the study demonstrate that although both unaltered nature sounds and degraded nature sounds result in affective restoration, performance-based cognitive restoration may require exposure to perceptually rich and high quality sounds. Implications of the findings and future directions for research are discussed.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Notes
Thesis Advisor(s):
Dr. Stephen Van Hedger