Viewing Digital Nature Scenes Not Sufficient to Enhance Verbal Creativity in Children

Abstract

Some prior studies suggest that nature exposure can bolster creativity in adults and adolescents, but little is known about the effect of nature stimuli on children's creativity. We investigated the effect of exposure to static images of natural and urban scenery on verbal creativity in children using a between-subjects repeated measures design. Fifty-five children (ages 8–15 years; mean = 11.05) were randomly allocated to the urban or nature condition and completed two verbal creativity measures (alternative uses and similarities tasks) before and after viewing 100 urban/nature images. Twenty-four participants were tested in-person and, due to COVID-19, 31 were tested online. Independent samples t-tests indicated that participants tested online versus in-person did not differ on characterization variables (e.g., age, gender, verbal cognitive ability) or creativity measure scores, and thus, the groups were combined for subsequent analyses. Repeated-measures analysis of variance did not support the hypothesis that children in the nature condition would demonstrate more improvement in verbal creativity than those in the urban condition. These findings suggest that short exposures to nature scenery were not sufficient to enhance verbal creativity in children. This research is the first to examine the effect of brief nature exposure on verbal creativity in children and provides important directions for future research.