Understanding Nature and Cognition: Emerging Perspectives on Human-Environment Interaction ft. Jason Watson

GundxChange

In these weekly talks, hosted by the Gund Institute for Environment, scholars and leaders exchange ("xChange") new research and solutions for people and planet.

This week, many studies have shown that interacting with nature may have beneficial effects for one’s mental health. More specifically, interacting with nature may have dual benefits, both reducing stress and improving attentional control, defined as the ability to actively maintain task goals and avoid sources of interference, thereby representing a critical cornerstone of higher-order cognition. The present talk will briefly highlight ongoing, cutting-edge research in the interdisciplinary field of environment and cognition with respect to both methodological approaches and the core mental and neural processes most likely to benefit from interacting with nature including attention and emotion. These findings will be discussed in light of emerging, integrated perspectives on how human-environment interaction influences both arousal (emotion) and engagement (attention). Future research directions will also be considered with respect to nature’s influence on attention.

About the speaker: Dr. Watson is an experimental cognitive psychologist with a longstanding interest in the control of attention - defined as maintaining task goals and minimizing distractions - as it relates to human behavior and its neural/psychophysiological correlates as observed in both more traditional laboratory contexts and in more applied settings. Dr. Watson’s research has increasingly begun to focus on what impact interacting with nature or urban environments may have on affect and attention. Consistent with this idea, Dr. Watson’s most recent empirical work suggests interacting with nature may calibrate the control of attention, thereby optimizing performance during certain cognitive tasks. Given his interdisciplinary research interests in environment and cognition, Dr. Watson is the lead guest editor of a Special Issue on nature’s influence on attention that will be published in 2027 at the Journal of Cognitive Psychology. Dr. Watson is also the Principal Investigator for the Society for Nature and Cognition, a newly formed, collaborative research group who meets in conjunction with the annual scientific meeting of the Psychonomic Society.