Higher correlated colour temperature ambient lighting, which contains more blue light, has been reported to improve performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. The current investigation compared performance of adults on what/where task switching, go/no-go, and mental rotation tasks when the experimental room was lit by 3500 K standard florescent and 5000 K LED lighting. Results showed that, under higher correlated colour temperature illumination, females (but not males) decreased reaction time by approximately 10% on the task switching task, that males (but not females) showed a reaction time decrease on the go/no-go tasks, and that no effect was observed on the mental rotation task. Our results suggest that higher correlated colour temperature illumination improves reaction time performance on certain attention/executive function tasks, but that that improvement is gender specific.
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