Nature is frequently described as beneficial for attention, memory, learning and mental wellbeing. In architecture and education, this idea is often translated into a simple prescription: provide views of greenery, introduce plants or display natural imagery, and cognitive performance will improve.
But cognition is not a single, unified ability. Paying attention, resisting distraction, holding information in mind and retrieving something no longer immediately available are related processes, but they are not interchangeable. If exposure to nature supports one of them, it does not necessarily support them all.
A 2024 study by Brooke Z. Charbonneau, Jason M. Watson and Keith A. Hutchison examines this distinction. Rather than asking whether nature improves cognition in general, the researchers asked a more precise question: which components of working memory capacity, if any, benefit from viewing natural rather than urban scenes?
Their findings complicate the familiar claim that nature simply “improves memory”. The benefit appeared to be more selective.
Attention Is Not the Same as Memory
Working memory capacity allows us to retain and use information while pursuing a goal without becoming distracted. It is involved when a student follows a sequence of instructions, works through a mathematical problem or keeps the beginning of a sentence in mind while reading its end.
The researchers treated this capacity as the result of three interacting processes:
Attentional control helps us focus on information that matters while suppressing competing stimuli or responses.
Primary memory keeps a limited amount of currently relevant information active and immediately available.
Secondary memory allows information that is no longer active to be retrieved when it is needed again.
These processes normally work together, which makes them difficult to separate. A task described as a test of “working memory” may also demand substantial attentional control. Better performance could therefore reflect an improved ability to resist interference rather than an increase in memory itself.
This problem may help explain why previous studies have produced inconsistent findings about nature and cognition. Different experiments use different tasks, and tasks carrying the same label do not always measure precisely the same underlying process.
Why Nature Is Expected to Restore Attention
The study draws on Attention Restoration Theory, developed by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan. The theory proposes that directed attention—the effortful attention used to remain focused and inhibit distraction—can become fatigued. Natural environments may engage us through “soft fascination”: they hold attention without requiring the same continuous effort demanded by many everyday tasks.
Under this account, nature does not necessarily give the brain more memory capacity. Instead, it may temporarily reduce the demands placed upon directed attention, allowing the mechanisms used to control distraction to function more effectively.
The theory has been influential, but the evidence is not uniform. Reviews have reported benefits across certain measures of working memory, cognitive flexibility and attentional control, while other tasks show little or no change. Critics have also questioned whether directed attention is literally depleted and restored in the way the theory proposes.
Charbonneau and colleagues approached the problem by looking beyond the names of individual tasks. They selected measures designed to distinguish attentional control, primary memory and secondary memory and tested the processes both separately and in combination.
Three Experiments, One Controlled Comparison
The study consisted of three online experiments involving university students recruited from Montana State University. The final samples comprised 82, 88 and 87 participants respectively. Although the age ranges extended beyond early adulthood, the samples consisted largely of university students, with mean ages of approximately 20 years. Participants completed the experiments on their own computers, in screen environments that could not be fully standardised.
The researchers used the same collection of 40 natural and 40 urban images throughout the study. Before blocks of cognitive trials, participants viewed one image for ten seconds.
The first experiment examined working memory capacity using two complex tasks. Participants had to remember visual information while simultaneously completing another operation. Performance following natural images did not differ from performance following urban images.
The second experiment focused specifically on attentional control. It used two tasks requiring participants to resist an automatic or distracting response. In one, they had to look away from a sudden visual cue to identify a target appearing on the opposite side of the screen. In the other, they had to identify the direction of a central arrow while ignoring surrounding arrows that could point in a conflicting direction.
The results suggested a modest and task-specific attentional advantage. In the Flanker Deadline task, performance following natural images was approximately 0.32 standard deviations higher than performance following urban images. No corresponding difference appeared in the antisaccade task. An exploratory analysis suggested that variation in participants’ screen sizes may have affected the latter, although this cannot fully explain the inconsistency. The study therefore provides suggestive evidence of a specific attentional benefit, not proof that every form of attentional control improves after viewing nature.
The third experiment separated primary and secondary memory using tasks involving symbols, icons and paired associations. The researchers found no convincing advantage for natural images in either memory component. An initial difference in secondary memory became uncertain once outliers and Bayesian evidence were considered.
Taken together, the experiments produced a revealing pattern: under these experimental conditions, the researchers found modest evidence that natural imagery supported one measure of attentional control, but no convincing evidence that it improved working memory capacity, primary memory or secondary memory. This does not establish that memory cannot benefit from nature under different conditions; it shows that such a benefit was not reliably detected here.
Nature May Help Us Resist Distraction
The most useful interpretation is not that nature expands the amount of information the mind can hold. It may instead help the mind manage competing information more effectively.
Imagine trying to listen to a teacher while other students are talking; notifications appear on a screen, and colourful displays compete for attention. The challenge is not necessarily a lack of memory. It may be the effort required to maintain the intended goal while inhibiting everything else.
If natural exposure supports attentional control, its value may lie in helping people select what matters and resist interference. That could be relevant in classrooms, workplaces, healthcare settings and homes—especially where sustained concentration is required.
But this possibility should not be converted into a design formula. The experiment did not test classrooms, windows, indoor plants or real landscapes. It tested repeated, ten-second exposures to selected images during online cognitive tasks. An image on a computer screen is not equivalent to looking through a window, sitting beneath a tree or walking through a park.
The natural and urban images also differed in more than the presence of vegetation. The researchers had previously asked a separate group of participants to evaluate the same image collection. In that independent rating study, the natural scenes were judged to be more fascinating, mysterious and likeable and were associated with lower reported anxiety and higher mindfulness and perceived resilience. These ratings did not come from the participants completing the cognitive experiments.
We therefore cannot assume that “nature” alone produced the cognitive difference. Visual complexity, composition, emotional response, preference and other characteristics may also have contributed.
What This Means for Design
The study does not tell architects to add a plant beside every desk. It offers something more valuable: a reminder to define the intended outcome before prescribing an environmental intervention.
If the goal is to support attentional control, access to restorative visual experiences may be relevant. This could include views towards vegetation, opportunities for brief visual respite or spaces that reduce the need to monitor competing stimuli. Yet these features must be considered alongside lighting, acoustics, movement, spatial legibility, visual clutter and the demands of the activity taking place.
A natural view cannot compensate for a room that continually overloads its occupants. Nor is every view of nature necessarily restorative. A window may introduce glare, movement or distraction. Dense vegetation may feel calming to one person and unsafe or visually confusing to another. The effect will depend on the qualities of the scene, the task, the duration of exposure and the person experiencing it.
Future studies could move beyond the broad comparison between “natural” and “urban” scenes to isolate potentially relevant qualities: lower visual clutter, greater spatial depth, coherent patterns, slowly moving elements, opportunities for visual exploration or fewer cues that demand continuous monitoring. These are hypotheses to be tested, not design principles established by the present study. Identifying such features would allow designers to investigate what actually supports attention rather than treating “nature” as a single, uniform intervention.
These distinctions are particularly important when discussing neurodivergent people. Individuals differ in sensory sensitivity, distractibility, attentional regulation and their responses to visual complexity. The study did not investigate neurodivergence, children or people working and learning together in real environments. Its findings should therefore inform new questions, not universal assumptions about who will benefit and how.
Better Questions Produce Better Evidence
One of the study’s strongest contributions is methodological. Research can produce apparently contradictory results when different tasks are assumed to measure the same cognitive ability. If an experiment reports that nature improved “working memory”, we need to ask what the participants actually did and which combination of attention and memory the task required.
The same discipline should guide evidence-based design. Broad statements such as “nature improves learning” are appealing, but they conceal the mechanisms that would make the claim useful. Did an intervention reduce stress? Improve attentional control? Support recall? Increase positive mood? Encourage movement? The answer matters because each outcome may require a different spatial response.
This study does not weaken the case for integrating nature into the built environment. It makes the case more precise. Nature may support cognition, but its effects are neither automatic nor evenly distributed across every mental process.
Perhaps the most responsible question is no longer whether nature is good for the brain. It is:
Which qualities of natural experience support which cognitive processes, for whom, during which activities and under what conditions?
That question is less convenient than a universal design rule. It is also far more likely to lead to environments that genuinely support the people who use them.
References
Charbonneau, B. Z., Watson, J. M., & Hutchison, K. A. (2024). Investigating the benefits of viewing nature for components of working memory capacity. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 99, 102418. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102418
Joye, Y., & Dewitte, S. (2018). Nature’s broken path to restoration: A critical look at Attention Restoration Theory. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 59, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2018.08.006
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2
Stevenson, M. P., Schilhab, T., & Bentsen, P. (2018). Attention Restoration Theory II: A systematic review to clarify attention processes affected by exposure to natural environments. Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B, 21(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1080/10937404.2018.1505571
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