Effects of indoor nature exposure on stress levels and cognitive performance in challenging circumstances

This project explores the potential of indoor nature exposure in improving stress levels and cognitive performance, providing data, guidelines, and insight regarding its effectiveness, categorisation, and underlying mechanisms. The focus is on situations similar to everyday life with demands from work, education, or other sources of stress or cognitive load, rather than relaxation. Suitable methods are developed to analyse different types and levels of indoor nature exposure across the research field and to evaluate its impacts and effect sizes. To this end, an exploration and tests of psychophysiological stress measurement methods in a laboratory are conducted, and a computerised stress induction paradigm is developed. Cognitive performance measurements are investigated, a cognitive performance measure is integrated into the paradigm, and the related computerised instructions are developed through a user experience analysis. Existing data on different types of indoor nature exposure and its effects on stress levels and cognitive performance are investigated in the current context. Indications from these stages are combined in a computerised laboratory experiment that tests different levels of indoor nature exposure and the impact of nature connectedness on stress levels and cognitive performance, measured through electrodermal activity, heart rate, and Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT) performance. The results are combined into suggested thresholds and recommended features of effective indoor nature exposure, with estimates of achievable effect sizes. The insights from the exploration of the mechanisms behind the nature effects are used to suggest a way of viewing nature effects that could explain a range of heterogeneous results in nature research and serve as an integrative element to a number of existing theories. The applicability of the findings in the current work extends to a variety of contexts, including office work, educational settings, public waiting areas, care settings, and more unusual situations such as pandemic circumstances or long-haul space exploration.