Stephen Pont’s presentation (“Green Schoolyards Support Healthy Bodies, Minds and Communities") at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) indicates that medical professionals are recognizing the value of green spaces. An AAP press release shares the abstract for Pont’s session: “Schoolyards present an ideal, though usually untapped, environment to support the health of children.
Travers and her colleagues investigated the link between walkability and actual walking among a group of Australian adults over 65 years old. Looking at areas in a 400-meter radius around participants’ homes, the team “found no association between walkability of the built environment and walking behavior of participants. Although retirement village residents lived in more highly walkable environments, they did not walk more and their overall levels of physical activity were lower than those of community residents.”
Cheng, Ju, Sun, and Lin investigated what LED light levels are preferred by older viewers. They report on their research with people 55 – 65 years old: “In this study, experiments were conducted under LED lighting with . . . three different illuminance levels (30lux; 100lux; 1000lux). . . . they [study participants] prefer higher illuminance, which makes them find the lighting environment more comfortable, brighter, and better for reading.”
Bratt-Eggen and her team researched sound levels in open-plan study spaces. The investigators collected information in “five open-plan study environments at universities in the Netherlands. A questionnaire was used to investigate student tasks, perceived sound sources and their perceived disturbance, and sound measurements were performed to determine the room acoustic parameters. This study shows that 38% of the surveyed students are disturbed by background noise in an open-plan study environment.
National culture affects room design desires
Ulset and her research team investigated links between time spent outside and cognitive development. The team conducted a study in Norway that “examined the . . . relations between the amount of time children [average age when study began was 52 months] attending daycare spend outdoors [in naturalistic settings] and their cognitive and behavioral development during preschool and first grade. . . . analyses showed a positive relation between outdoor hours and [development of attention skills] and an inverse relation between outdoor hours and [inattention-hyperactivity symptoms]. . . .
Skelton and her colleagues thoroughly investigated how babies (4 to 6 month olds) experience colors. They determined that “infants have color categories for red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. We show that infants’ categorical distinctions align strikingly with those that are commonly made in the world’s different color lexicons [systems/dictionaries]. . . .
A guide to getting people where they want to be
Papalambros and her team have learned that hearing pink noise (described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise) while sleeping can enhance sleep quality and memory performance the day after the pink noise is heard among older individuals. People 60 to 84 years old participated in the Papalambros lead study and the pink noise was coordinated with sleeping brain rhythms. Zhou, Liu, Li, Ma, Zhang, and Fang (2012) reported, more generally, that “steady pink noise has significant effect on reducing brain wave complexity and induc
Moss and Earle tested the effects of smelling rosemary on working memory in children. They found that “Exposure to the aroma of rosemary essential oil can significantly enhance working memory in children. . . . A total of 40 children aged 10 to 11 took part in a class based test on different mental tasks. Children were randomly assigned to a room that had either rosemary oil diffused in it for ten minutes or a room with no scent. . . . Analysis revealed that the children in the aroma room received significantly higher scores than the non-scented room.
