Does Taking a Walk in Nature Enhance Long-Term Memory?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Given recent evidence that contact with nature can enhance cognitive processes, we measured whether students who took a brief on-campus walk in a natural environment showed improved retention of learned materials. Using a within-subjects design, we compared the effects of 10-minute walks in nature, urban, and indoor environments on long-term memory for word lists. Recall and recognition for word lists were tested in the indoor environment either after each walk (Experiment 1) or before each walk (Experiment 2). We failed to find an influence of walk type on either memory test in either experiment. Thus, contact with nature did not enhance students' long-term memory under the conditions we tested. Our results contrast with a recent study in which learners showed better memory for lecture materials learned in a nature-enhanced classroom than in a control classroom. We identify potential explanations for our null findings and suggest future research directions. Key Words: Nature—Environment—Memory—Recall—Recognition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".