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Abstract
The physical environments that people spend time in have wide ranging effects on cognitive functioning, health, and well-being. One under-studied influence of the physical environment is how it may influence thought content. Given the impact that conscious thoughts have on the behaviors and lived experience of people, thought content is important to examine to fully understand the myriad effects the external environment has on human health and well-being. In Chapter 1, I analyzed thousands of journal entries written by park visitors to examine how low-level and semantic visual features of the parks correlated with different thought topics. I then conducted an online study to experimentally manipulate exposure to specific visual features to determine if they induced thinking about the same thought topics under more generalized conditions. Results demonstrated a potential causal role for perceived naturalness and high non-straight edges on thinking about topics related to “Nature” and “Spiritual & Life Journey”. In Chapter 2, I examined whether the influence of visual features on thought content observed in Chapter 1 remained in the absence of overt semantic content, which could indicate a more fundamental mechanism for this effect. To do so, I created scrambled edge versions of images, which maintained edge content from the original images but removed scene identification. I extended previous findings by showing that non-straight edges retain their influence on the selection of a “Spiritual & Life Journey” topic even for the scrambled scenes. In Chapters 3 and 4, I used a randomized-control within-subject experience sampling design to examine thoughts and feelings during explorations of two public spaces, a nature conservatory and an indoor mall. This allowed me to examine the time course of affective and cognitive states as a function of short-term exploration of different environments, as well as how individual differences in personality traits interact with these environment-related thoughts and feelings. In Chapter 3 I focus on the temporal and affective aspects of thoughts, state affect, and working memory performance while in Chapter 4 I discuss how pro-social and pro-environmental thoughts and feelings are impacted in the two settings. Taken together, these studies indicate an important role for the physical environment on individuals’ cognition and affect. They demonstrate that both semantic and low-level qualities of the local environment can influence these processes over relatively short timeframes. This body of work adds to our understanding of how elements of the natural environment may be beneficial for mental health and has implications for the design and use of public spaces.