When study­ing com­plex tasks, tak­ing a moment away from the prob­lem is a proven way to refo­cus one’s thoughts.

How dif­fer­ent sur­round­ings affect this “atten­tion restora­tion” has now been stud­ied and it has been dis­cov­ered that the more com­plex a prob­lem, the more a nat­ural (non-urban) scene ben­e­fits our focus and study–whether this nat­ural scene is real (e.g. a walk in a park) or not (e.g. land­scape pho­tographs) doesn’t matter.

In a sec­ond exper­i­ment, stu­dents did both a back­wards digit-span and a sec­ond, visual atten­tion task. Instead of going for a walk between tests, they viewed pic­tures of nat­ural scenes or urban scenes. Once again, scores improved sig­nif­i­cantly more on the digit-span task after view­ing nat­ural scenes com­pared to urban scenes. On the visual atten­tion task, the stu­dents were only bet­ter at the task in cer­tain cases. For very sim­ple tasks with few dis­trac­tors, there was no dif­fer­ence between the stu­dents see­ing nat­ural or urban scenes. But for more com­plex tasks requir­ing more focused atten­tion, again the stu­dents who had seen the nat­ural scenes did better.