Thus far, the most prominent theory that attempts to explain why nature is beneficial to cognition is the Attention Restoration Theory (ART). The theory suggests that nature acts on the two forms of human attention. One is bottom-up attention, which is automatic and driven by the physical features of the environment. The other is top-down attention, which is a controlled form of attention, often required to achieve behavioural goals. The ART suggests that nature is able to capture bottom-up attention moderately – not boring but just enough to be interesting. At the same time, nature is processed fluently enough to not require controlled effort, giving the top-down attention system a chance to restore itself, improving cognition and mood. In other words, natural scenes trigger a form of attention that is undemanding or effortless, thus enabling people to rest and restore the more effortful forms of attention, resulting in a positive or pleasant experience. This form of attention is termed as "soft fascination". Conversely, urban scenes capture bottom-up attention dramatically, and additionally require vigilance and directed attention, consuming all available attentional resources and overwhelming the system, resulting in a negative experience.
However, the existing research had not clearly defined "soft fascination" or how/why nature captures attention “moderately”. Thus, we turned to theories of aesthetic pleasure. The Infovore Hypothesis posits that people enjoy seeking out information, and thus derive pleasure from scenes in which there is a great amount of novel and interpretable information to decipher. Similarly, within a predictive coding framework, the brain is constantly generating predictions about its environment, therefore we seek to gather new information to reduce prediction errors about the world. The Pleasure-Interest Model of Aesthetic Liking further theorizes that if there are no prediction errors (i.e. disfluency) to reduce, the resulting experience is boredom. The advantage of these aesthetic theories over the ART is that they explain how a scene can be described as simple but not boring, or interesting but not overwhelming (i.e. the “moderate” cases).
By researching the cognitive benefits of nature through the lens of aesthetics research, I was able to find a novel link between attentional focus and improvements on a working memory task. Here, I was able to show that "soft fascination" may represent a decoupling between attention and aesthetics. While we typically pay more attention to the things we like, I found that in order for an environment to be beneficial, it should be pleasant without capturing more attention.
