The research behind Attention Restoration Theory
There is a particular kind of tiredness that has very little to do with needing sleep. You have been concentrating for several hours, switching between tasks, ignoring distractions and keeping track of things that require deliberate attention. Eventually, reading the same paragraph takes three attempts, small interruptions become unusually irritating and staying focused requires noticeably more effort.
Psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan became interested in how environments might affect this kind of mental fatigue. Their work contributed to Attention Restoration Theory, which proposes that certain environments can help restore our capacity for directed attention by engaging us in ways that require less deliberate mental effort.
Nature became particularly important in the research because many natural environments appear to contain characteristics the Kaplans believed could support this restorative process. The theory does not simply claim that being outside is relaxing. It attempts to explain why spending time in one environment might affect our ability to concentrate when we return to something demanding.
THE RESEARCH
In a 2008 study, psychologists Marc Berman, John Jonides and Stephen Kaplan tested whether interacting with natural and urban environments produced measurable differences in cognitive performance.
Participants first completed a demanding task designed to fatigue directed attention. They were then assigned to take a roughly 50-minute walk along one of two routes in Ann Arbor, Michigan. One route passed through an arboretum containing trees and natural surroundings. The other took participants through busy downtown streets.
Before and after the walks, participants completed a task involving working memory and attention. The researchers found that performance improved substantially after the nature walk but not after the urban walk. Importantly, the difference could not simply be explained by participants being in a better mood after walking through nature. The improvement in cognitive performance remained even when mood was taken into account.
The researchers then conducted a second experiment to see whether physical exercise or simply being outdoors might explain the result. This time, participants did not go anywhere. After completing another attentionally demanding task, they viewed photographs of either natural environments or urban settings.
Again, participants subsequently performed better on the attention task after viewing the nature images than after viewing the urban images.
The findings were consistent with an idea the Kaplans had been developing for years: environments may differ in the demands they place on our attention and those differences can affect our ability to concentrate afterwards.
THE FINDING
The important distinction in Attention Restoration Theory is between directed attention and effortless attention.
Directed attention is what you use when the thing you need to concentrate on is not necessarily the thing most capable of capturing your attention. Reading a complicated report while people are talking nearby requires directed attention. So does working through a difficult problem, listening carefully during a long meeting or writing while resisting the urge to check your phone.
This form of attention requires inhibition. You have to maintain focus on one thing while repeatedly preventing other stimuli, thoughts and impulses from taking over.
The Kaplans proposed that this capacity can become fatigued with prolonged use.
Certain environments, however, can hold our attention without requiring the same degree of deliberate effort. A moving stream, clouds, leaves shifting in the wind or a path curving out of view can be interesting enough to engage us without demanding intense concentration.
The Kaplans referred to this quality as soft fascination.
The idea is that when attention is being held relatively effortlessly, directed attention has an opportunity to rest.
THE THEORY
Attention Restoration Theory identifies four characteristics that the Kaplans believed contribute to a restorative environment: being away, fascination, extent and compatibility.
Being away refers to experiencing some psychological distance from the activities and environments that ordinarily demand your attention. This does not necessarily require traveling somewhere remote. A nearby park can create a sufficient change in context if it provides a meaningful break from the demands you were previously managing.
Fascination describes an environment's ability to capture attention without requiring substantial deliberate effort. Natural environments often contain movement, variation and sensory information that can hold attention without asking us to accomplish anything with it.
Extent refers to the sense that an environment has enough coherence and scope to feel like a world you can mentally enter. A woodland path, garden or large park can provide a sense that there is something beyond what you can immediately see and enough continuity to remain mentally engaged.
Finally, compatibility concerns how well the environment fits what you are trying to do. A theoretically beautiful environment will not be particularly restorative if navigating it is stressful, uncomfortable or requires constant vigilance.
Nature often provides all four characteristics, which is one reason it became central to the theory. But the framework is about the psychological qualities of an environment, not simply whether that environment contains trees.
NOT THE SAME THING
Attention fatigue is not the same as being generally tired
If you have spent the day concentrating intensely, the resulting difficulty focusing can easily be interpreted as a lack of motivation. You sit down to continue working and find yourself checking messages, rereading sentences or wandering away from the task. The obvious response is often to try harder.
Attention Restoration Theory offers another possible explanation. The problem may not be that you have suddenly become lazy or uninterested. The attentional system you have been relying on may simply have been working for a long time.
This also doesn't mean that every walk in a park will restore everyone's attention or that natural environments are a substitute for sleep. Research on nature and cognition has continued to develop since the Kaplans proposed their theory, and researchers still debate the mechanisms responsible for the effects that have been observed.
Nor does the theory demonstrate that urban environments are inherently harmful. Cities vary enormously and can contain parks, quiet streets, water, architecture and other environments that people experience as restorative. An urban environment can also be exciting, stimulating and deeply enjoyable.
The relevant question is more specific: what does this environment require from your attention?
WHY IT MATTERS
Modern life contains an extraordinary number of small demands on directed attention. A phone notification appears while you are writing. Someone sends a message while you are reading it. A meeting requires you to follow a conversation while simultaneously monitoring your own response. A commute involves traffic, signs, people, announcements and decisions about where to go next.
None of these demands is necessarily difficult in isolation. The cumulative effect is more interesting.
When concentration begins to deteriorate, we often respond by changing the task while keeping the same attentional environment. You stop working on the document and check email. You leave email and open social media. You read the news, respond to messages and then return to the original document.
This may feel like a break because you stopped doing the difficult task. From an attentional perspective, however, you may simply have replaced one set of stimuli requiring selection and inhibition with another.
Attention Restoration Theory suggests that a more useful break may sometimes involve changing the kind of attention you are using.
This is one reason a short walk can feel surprisingly different from twenty minutes spent scrolling on a phone. Both technically interrupt work, but they create very different attentional conditions.
The theory also provides a useful way to think about leisure. Time that looks unproductive from the outside can still serve a function. Walking somewhere without a destination, sitting in a garden or spending time in an environment that asks very little of you may help restore a capacity that will be required again later.
Rest is not always the absence of activity. Sometimes it is the absence of a particular kind of demand.
TRY THIS
The next time you notice that concentration has become unusually difficult, pay attention to what you instinctively choose as a break. If it involves another screen, another stream of information or another activity requiring constant decisions about what deserves your attention, try changing the environment instead.
Go somewhere that doesn't require you to accomplish very much. A park, a tree-lined street, a garden or somewhere near water can work. Leave yourself enough time to actually notice the environment rather than turning the walk into another task to complete.
Then pay attention to what happens when you return.
You don't need to assume that nature has magically reset your brain. You are simply testing a more useful question than Why can't I concentrate?
Ask instead: What has my attention been doing for the last several hours and have I actually given it a different kind of work?
References
Berman, M. G., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1207-1212.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169-182.