Biophilia in practice: children perceive the restorative value of nature and this improves performance in attention test

According to E.O. Wilson (2002), attention is the fundamental faculty of the construct “biophilia”. Biophilia depends on the ability to attend without conscious effort and to let oneself be fascinated by Nature. The present study investigated three issues concerned with biophilia and the perception of Nature restorativeness in children, specifically: (1) Do children feel to be connected with natural environments and, if so, to what extent? (2) Do children perceive the difference between the restorative value of a natural and an artificial environment? (3) Does the perceived restorativeness of Nature affect children’s performance in directed attention test? To investigate these questions, 48 children of a primary school in Aosta (Italy), aged between 10 and 12 years, evaluated the perceived restorativeness of and performed an attention test in three different environments, i.e.: 1) the school playground after the school break; 2) an alpine wood; 3) the classroom after the practice of Mindful Silence, a training based on mindfulness meditation techniques. Results showed that though children feel moderately connected with Nature, they perceived the wood as the most restorative environment, then – unexpectedly – the classroom after Mindful Silence and finally the school playground, which was perceived as the least restorative, though the presence of a few natural elements. The high restorative power of the wood positively affected children’s performance in the directed attention test; nevertheless the Mindful Silence turned out to be more efficacious – and therefore a useful tool – than the school playground to affect directed attention.