A Plasma Display Window?—The Shifting Baseline Problem in a Technologically Mediated Natural World

Citation

Kahn Jr, P. H., Friedman, B., Gill, B., Hagman, J., Severson, R. L., Freier, N. G., Feldman, E. N., Carrère, S., & Stolyar, A. (2008). A plasma display window?—The shifting baseline problem in a technologically mediated natural world. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 28(2), 192–199. doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2007.10.008

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Technology is changing how people live, and humans will keep adapting to an increasingly digital world. This study asks: does that adaptation come at a cost to well-being? To explore this, researchers looked at whether a digital view of nature could offer the same restorative benefits as the real thing.

In an office setting, 90 participants were divided into three groups. One group had a glass window looking out onto a natural scene, another had a plasma “window” showing a real-time, high-definition view of essentially the same scene, and a third group faced a blank wall. The researchers then measured how quickly each person’s heart rate recovered after a mild stressor.

The results were telling. The glass window helped people recover from stress significantly faster than the blank wall did, and the more time participants spent looking out at the real view, the more quickly their heart rates settled. The plasma window, however, offered no such benefit — it was no more restorative than the blank wall. In other words, even a remarkably lifelike digital image of nature did not seem to carry the calming power of the real thing.

The findings suggest that the well-documented benefits of viewing nature may be weakened when nature is experienced through a digital medium. As screens increasingly replace windows in modern life, this raises thoughtful questions about what is lost in translation, and what humans may need to protect in order to stay well.

Abstract

Figure 2. Heart rate recovery from low-level stress. Values are the mean slope of heart rate (in beats per minute per minute (bpm/min)) during the first 60 s of each activity. Negative values indicate decreasing heart rate, and points lower on the graph represent more rapid decreases in heart rate. (The activities are ordered by the overall average slope across all six activities.)

Humans will continue to adapt to an increasingly technological world. But are there costs to such adaptations in terms of human well being? Toward broaching this question, we investigated physiological effects of experiencing a HDTV quality real-time view of nature through a plasma display “window.” In an office setting, 90 participants (30 per group) were exposed either to (a) a glass window that afforded a view of a nature scene, (b) a plasma window that afforded a real-time HDTV view of essentially the same scene, or (c) a blank wall. Results showed that in terms of heart rate recovery from low-level stress the glass window was more restorative than a blank wall; in turn, a plasma window was no more restorative than a blank wall. Moreover, when participants spent more time looking at the glass window, their heart rate tended to decrease more rapidly; that was not the case with the plasma window. Discussion focuses on how the purported benefits of viewing nature may be attenuated by a digital medium.