For children with ADHD, a simple, inexpensive concentration booster may be a "dose of nature." The finding comes from a study conducted at the University of Illinois (UI) that shows that children with ADHD demonstrate greater attention after a 20-minute walk in a park than after a similar walk in an urban area or a residential neighborhood. "From our previous research, we knew there might be a link between spending time in nature and reduced ADHD symptoms," said UI researcher Andrea Faber Taylor. "So to confirm that link we conducted a study in which we took children on walks in three different settings - one especially 'green' and two less 'green' - and kept everything about the walks as similar as possible."
"We compared each child's performance to their own performance on different walks," said Faber Taylor. "And when we compared the scores for the walks in different environments, we found that after the walk in the park children generally concentrated better than they did after a walk in the downtown area or the neighborhood area. The greenest space was best at improving attention after exposure."
"What this particular study tells us is that the physical environment matters," said co-researcher Frances E. Kuo. "We don't know what it is about the park, exactly - the greenness or lack of buildings - that seems to improve attention, but the study tells us that even though everything else was the same - who the child was with, the levels of noise, the length of time, the time of day, whether the child was on medication - if we kept everything else the same, we just changed the environment, we still saw a measurable difference in children's symptoms. And that's completely new."
Faber Taylor added that the benefits of a dose of nature don't apply just to children with ADHD. "We're all on a continuum of attention so this study has implications for all of us," said Faber Taylor. "ADHD is just at the far end of attention functioning, but there're plenty of us who fall somewhere close to that end of the continuum, and we all experience times when we're mentally fatigued - times when we're less able to focus and do tasks and get easily distracted. The evidence suggests that natural settings can benefit everyone, even children who have not been diagnosed with ADHD."
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Source: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
