These data suggest that experiencing the mediated naturalenvironment, lacking in sound, was unsatisfactory for someparticipants to the extent that it caused varying perceptionsof stress, boredom, and lack of concentration.
So virtual environments don't necessarily have the same positive impact, but that may be due to the lack of some sensory stimulation, such as sound. This study only used visuals.
This review hasfive key objectives, summarized inFigure 1.
Usually, when reading a paper, the last paragraph of the introduction is super important. It tells you what the objectives are of the paper! Always at least skim the last paragraph of the introduction!
systematic review byAletta et al. (2018)has identifiedlinks between positive urban soundscapes (which may alsoinclude nature sounds) and health and well-being, includingstress recovery
A paper that may be worth reading down the line
soundscape is defined asthe acoustic environment as perceived, understood, and/or experienced by people
This is a nice definition of a soundscape.
sound, smell, and touch
Dr. Fleming has been thinking about later on getting smell involved as well!
Much attention has been paid to the restorative value of natural environmentsin particular (Hartig et al., 2014). Studies on these topics tend to focus on visuo-spatial experience ofenvironments, utilizing stimuli such as photographs, videos, and slideshows, but environments arenot experienced through vision alone.
Woot. This could be the intro to our future papers!
positive, learned semantic associations with nature have arisen as a resultof recent work on sounds and restoration
I'm not sure what this means. I assume this will be clarified later.
Third, after stress and/or fatigue nature sounds and soundscapes canlead to subjectively and objectively improved mood and cognitive performance
This is great! This is what Dr. Fleming was talking about. So it's not just that you feel better, but you perform better cognitively!
thesesounds
Also interesting. So wind, water, and birdsong are all generally positive and restorative...
can enhance positive perceptions ofnatural environmentspresented through visual means
This is an interesting point. We're planning on presenting people with natural (and less natural) environments via virtual reality. So it will be good to see how people studied this enhancement of the positive percenptions of nature.
wind
Interesting that the sound of wind is a big one.
birdsong
Yay birdsong! It's interesting that this is one of the ways nature sounds is most broadly and commonly characterized. Even more interesting, because when you talk to people, most don't even notice bird songs when they're outside.
environmentsresearch
This seems like a good key term.
This paper should be a good starting point for us! It's a review paper, so it should catch us up on much of what has already been done. It's from 2021, so pretty recent too. I'm saying this, not having actually read it yet, so we'll see. :)