Attention restoration theory

Urban Farm DB summary

A Wikipedia article on attention restoration theory (ART), developed by Stephen and Rachel Kaplan in their 1989 book The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective, which holds that exposure to nature helps recovery from directed attention fatigue. It cites a 2025 meta-analysis finding consistent benefits to executive function and working memory after at least 30 minutes of nature exposure, with effects plateauing around 200-300 minutes, and notes findings that people who spent at least two hours in nature in the past week were more likely to report feeling healthy and well.

Only numbers and their conditions are stored, as structured data — never the source's own sentences. Metric and condition names stay in English, as coded.

• 30 minutes

  min effective exposure duration(nature exposure)

  Health

  method

  meta-analysis, 2025

• 200–300 minutes

  effect plateau duration(nature exposure)

  Health
• 2 hours

  weekly duration wellbeing threshold(nature exposure)

  Health

  method

  past-week self-report

Direction of conclusions

Each author conclusion is recorded only as a coded direction per topic. Read the original for the conclusion itself.

• Mental healthSupportsWith caveats