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dc.contributor.authorAtchley, Ruth Ann
dc.contributor.authorStrayer, David L.
dc.contributor.authorAtchley, Paul
dc.date.accessioned2013-07-29T21:27:03Z
dc.date.available2013-07-29T21:27:03Z
dc.date.issued2012-12-12
dc.identifier.citationAtchley, Ruth Ann; Strayer, David L.; and Atchley, Paul. (2012) Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings. Plos One, 7.12: 1-3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0051474
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1808/11538
dc.descriptionA grant from the One-University Open Access Fund at the University of Kansas was used to defray the author’s publication fees in this Open Access journal. The Open Access Fund, administered by librarians from the KU, KU Law, and KUMC libraries, is made possible by contributions from the offices of KU Provost, KU Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Studies, and KUMC Vice Chancellor for Research. For more information about the Open Access Fund, please see http://library.kumc.edu/authors-fund.xml.
dc.description.abstractAdults and children are spending more time interacting with media and technology and less time participating in activities in nature. This life-style change clearly has ramifications for our physical well-being, but what impact does this change have on cognition? Higher order cognitive functions including selective attention, problem solving, inhibition, and multi-tasking are all heavily utilized in our modern technology-rich society. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) suggests that exposure to nature can restore prefrontal cortex-mediated executive processes such as these. Consistent with ART, research indicates that exposure to natural settings seems to replenish some, lower-level modules of the executive attentional system. However, the impact of nature on higher-level tasks such as creative problem solving has not been explored. Here we show that four days of immersion in nature, and the corresponding disconnection from multi-media and technology, increases performance on a creativity, problem-solving task by a full 50% in a group of naive hikers. Our results demonstrate that there is a cognitive advantage to be realized if we spend time immersed in a natural setting. We anticipate that this advantage comes from an increase in exposure to natural stimuli that are both emotionally positive and low-arousing and a corresponding decrease in exposure to attention demanding technology, which regularly requires that we attend to sudden events, switch amongst tasks, maintain task goals, and inhibit irrelevant actions or cognitions. A limitation of the current research is the inability to determine if the effects are due to an increased exposure to nature, a decreased exposure to technology, or to other factors associated with spending three days immersed in nature.
dc.publisherPublic Library of Science
dc.rightsCopyright ©2012 Atchley et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.titleCreativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings
dc.typeArticle
kusw.kuauthorAtchley, Ruth Ann
kusw.kuauthorAtchley, Paul
kusw.kudepartmentDepartment of Psychology
kusw.oastatusfullparticipation
dc.identifier.doi10.1371/journal.pone.0051474
kusw.oaversionScholarly/refereed, publisher version
kusw.oapolicyThis item meets KU Open Access policy criteria.
dc.rights.accessrightsopenAccess


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Copyright ©2012 Atchley et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as: Copyright ©2012 Atchley et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.