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29-01-2024 | Research

Watching (natural) beauty boosts task performance: testing the nature-as-reward hypothesis

Auteurs: Yannick Joye, Florian Lange, Asta Lisauskienė, Diana Makauskaitė

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 3/2024

Abstract

In two online studies, we tested the “nature-as-reward hypothesis”, which suggests that superior cognitive task performance following nature exposure reflects a general performance improvement, driven by the reward value of beautiful things. In both between-subjects experiments, participants viewed either beautiful or less beautiful images for 10 s, comprising beautiful mountain photos (vs. less beautiful mountain drawings) in Study 1 and beautiful fractals (vs. less beautiful pixelated images) in Study 2. Following image exposure, participants engaged in a ticking task requiring them to freely tick up to 200 boxes. Participants had to complete four (Study 1) or five (Study 2) of such ticking tasks, with each task being preceded by either a beautiful or less beautiful image. In Study 1, for a subset of participants the ticking task was framed as a game. We found that in Study 1, ticking declined over the ticking rounds when participants had viewed less beautiful line drawings of mountains, while ticking performance remained unchanged over the rounds after seeing beautiful mountain images. However, when the ticking task was framed as a game, there was no significant difference in ticking performance between the two beauty conditions over the four ticking rounds. In Study 2, participants ticked more boxes over all ticking rounds after viewing images of beautiful fractals compared to less beautiful pixelated images. In line with the nature-as-reward hypothesis, these findings show that brief exposures to beautiful (nature) images can motivate to work and that framing tasks as a game can attenuate this beauty advantage.

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Follow-up analyses showed that controlling for device type (mobile device vs. computer), practice ticks, age group, gender, tiredness, or game enjoyment did not change the results of the target three-way ANOVA. Full results are reported in Appendix D.

The reason why we ended up with 202 instead of 200 participants is that Prolific had flagged two participants as timed out. However, we observed that we had complete data on these two participants, and we therefore retained them in the analyses. Excluding them did not change the results of our analyses.

Follow-up analyses showed that controlling for device type (mobile device vs. computer), age, gender, or work done before the study did not change the results. Full results are reported in Appendix I.

For example, Ohly et al.’s (2016) meta-analysis included 31 ART studies, out of which 28 had nature exposure times longer than 3 minutes. Among those studies with extended exposure times, 25 had exposure durations equal to, or exceeding 10 minutes.

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Titel: Watching (natural) beauty boosts task performance: testing the nature-as-reward hypothesis
Auteurs: Yannick Joye
Florian Lange
Asta Lisauskienė
Diana Makauskaitė
Publicatiedatum: 29-01-2024
Uitgeverij: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research / Uitgave 3/2024
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01922-9

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