place science

Millions of people listen to background music every day in open or cubicle style work environments to avoid being distracted from professional tasks.  

What people are daydreaming about influences how quickly they forget recently learned material, so different daydream cues are useful in particular situations. 

Cesario and his colleagues have investigated how place design influences responses to threatening stimuli. 

Hollis, an architect and designer who teaches at the Edinburgh College of Art, traces the life courses of classic examples of Western architecture. 

Hua and her colleagues comprehensively analyzed workplaces, identifying physical factors perceived by workers to support collaborative work or linked by workers to distractions from other people’s interactions. 

The longer something has been around, the more positive our evaluation of it.  

Everyday expressions link psychological depression with the color gray. 

People dislike being unoccupied, and clever designers may be able to reduce idleness in spaces they develop.

pace design matters to non-human species, too.

In a famous experiment about a decade ago, researchers found that half the people asked to pay attention to something that actors in a video were doing failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit who walked between those actors.