Greener neighbourhoods may be good for children’s brains

Children living in urban greener neighbourhoods may have better spatial working memory, according to new research by UCL Institute of Education.

Spatial working memory is a measure of how effective people are at orientation and recording information about their environment. It enables us to navigate through a city or remember the position of objects and is strongly inter-related with attentional control.

The research, conducted by Professor Eirini Flouri, Dr Efstathios Papachristou and Dr Emily Midouhas, found that lower quantity of neighborhood greenspace was related to poorer spatial working memory, and this relationship was the case in both deprived and non-deprived neighborhoods.

The study looked at 4758 11-year-olds living in urban areas in England, drawn from the Millennium Cohort Study – a study which is run by CLS and which has been following the participants lives closely since they were born.

The team measured spatial working memory through visual and spatial memory tests conducted on computers. The participants were asked to search for blue tokens hidden within coloured boxes displayed on a computer screen without returning to a box where a token had previously been found. The task gradually became more difficult as the number of boxes increased.

The researchers measured the number of errors made by participants and found that children in neighbourhoods with more greenspace made fewer errors. They were also more likely to be from socio-economic advantaged backgrounds and participate in sport.

When factoring in controls relating to family poverty, parental education, sports participation and neighbourhood deprivation, the findings suggest that exposure to greenspace may have specific cognitive benefits for children.

“Our findings suggest a positive role of greenspace in cognitive functioning. Spatial working memory is an important cognitive ability that is strongly related with academic achievement in children, particularly mathematics performance,”said Professor Eirini Flouri.

“If the association we established between neighborhood greenspace and children’s spatial working memory is causal, then our findings can be used to inform decisions about both education and urban planning.”

The study was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the findings were published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology.

Read the full paper

‘The role of neighbourhood greenspace in children’s spatial working memory’ by Eirini Flouri, Efstathios Papachristou and Emily Midouhas was published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology in September 2018.