Quasi-Randomized Trial of Contact With Nature and Effects on Attention in Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children today spend less time in nature than previous generations and there is concern that this shift negatively impacts children’s cognitive abilities, particularly their ability to direct their attention. Theories, such as the Attention Restoration Theory (ART), suggest that contact with nature may replenish endogenous attention (e.g., directed, voluntary attention). There is a lack of rigorous research on how contact with nature is associated with attentional performance in children. This study employed a quasi-experimental design and included a sample of typically-developing children to investigate performance on computerized endogenous and exogenous attention tasks before and after exposure to one of two interventions – a thirty-minute walk in either an urban (n = 30) or natural (forested, n=30) environment. The two experimental groups were equivalent with regard to sex ratio, age, IQ, and connectedness to nature. Attention was assessed using the Combined Attention Systems Test (CAST), a state-of-the-art assessment tool designed to evaluate exogenous and endogenous attention characteristics. Bayesian hierarchical modeling of both response times (RT) and errors (ER) was employed to evaluate the fixed effect of attentional measures and interactions with session and group. Consistent with predictions of ART, results support credible effects of the nature intervention on two measures of endogenous attention: Alerting RT: d=0.85 (95% CI: 0.21-1.8), Orienting ER: d=1.45 (95% CI: 0.17-7.18), but not on any of the measures of exogenous attention.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".