The Wall Street Journal recently published an excellent article penned by Wendy Bounds on a hot topic here at MNN: the air-purifying qualities of the common house plant. Given that the air inside your home can be 2 to 5 times more polluted than the air outside of it, making it clean with plants like peace lily (百合花) and asparagus fern (芦笋蕨) is an economical artistically pleasing alternative to air purifiers. So it's been acknowledged that a bunch of pretty putted houseplants can help you maintain a healthier home, but a smarter home?
That's the question in light of a recent study published by the Journal of Environmental Psychology showing that the presence of plants in a room, particularly in an office environment, can shrink attention span (范围). Struggling directive attention (the kind of attention that takes effort) can be refreshed through exposure ho to naturalistic environments. Basically, taking a walk through the park can clear one's head. But can a head be refreshed simply by being surrounded by houseplants?
To test their theory, the study's authors rounded up a bunch of participants, put some of them in a mom with no plants and put others in a room with our plants placed around a desk, and put them all to the same series of tests. First was a Rearing Span Teat which involves reading a series of sentences aloud and remembering the Last word in each sentence. This task requires that you fluently switch between attention demanding tasks: from rending and memorizing at one moment to writing and recalling at the next. Next came a proofreading task fallowed by another Reading Span Test.
The results? Participants working in the room with the plants improved their performance from the first Reading Span Test to the second while those working in the room lacking in greenery did not. Consequently, the benefits of working among plants is indeed evident.
