Does beautiful nature motivate to work? Outlining an alternative pathway to nature-induced cognitive performance benefits

Abstract

Ample research shows that spending time in natural (vs. urban) environments, or merely watching nature scenes, can seemingly replenish depleted cognitive resources and thereby improve cognitive functioning. While such findings are traditionally explained by referring to Attention Restoration Theory (ART), in the present research, we outline and test a potential alternative explanation for nature-related performance benefits. Our account centers on the notion that the aesthetically pleasing character of nature scenes simply fosters individuals' willingness to work, including working on the cognitive tasks used in attention restoration research. After outlining our theoretical proposal, we report the results of a preregistered showcase study in which we asked participants (N = 219) to watch a slideshow of fifteen photos of natural scenes/elements. The beauty of the slideshow images was manipulated by presenting either aesthetically attractive nature images (beautiful nature condition) or nature images where the aesthetic qualities had been removed through pixilation (pixelated nature condition). We subsequently tested the effect of this manipulation on participants' performance on a simple and mindless “clicking task”, consisting of freely clicking radio buttons. We also varied the number of clicking tasks participants had to perform (between-subjects); while all participants had to click buttons after the nature slideshow, a subset of them also had to do the clicking task before watching the slideshow images. Results show that participants who only had to do the clicking task once (i.e., after the slideshow) and who had watched beautiful nature, clicked more buttons, and reported to feel more motivated to click buttons compared to participants who had watched relatively unappealing pixelated nature images. This general nature-related performance enhancement could account for the general pattern of positive nature effects on cognitive tasks without requiring ART's additional assumptions of resource replenishment and resource specificity.