Nature where there is no window
In 1986 the environmental psychologist Judith Heerwagen and Gordon Orians walked through 75 offices on the University of Washington campus and counted what hung on the walls. The windowless offices carried 195 pieces of visual material, the windowed ones 82. The content differed as well. People without a window put up landscapes, people with one put up cityscapes, and the nature themes clustered in the rooms that had no outside to look at.
The substitutes have since become electronic. In 2025 the built environment researcher Shuhan Liu compared a real window, an artificial window and no window at all, with heart rate variability recorded alongside cognitive tests. Against the windowless condition the artificial window raised the nLF/nHF focus ratio by about 22.2% and cut attention test times by 14.4%. On lighting comfort and acceptability it beat the real window.
The computer scientist Fariba Mostajeran built the same question in virtual reality in 2023. 39 people worked in a virtual office with plants and in one without, and scored higher on short-term memory and creativity with the plants there. Asked afterwards which office they preferred, 32 of the 39 chose the planted one and none chose the empty one. Mostajeran also passes on two of the most-quoted figures in this literature, Lohr’s 12% and Nieuwenhuis’s 15%. Neither original is open to us.
The most isolated test of the idea ran at the South Pole. The space medicine researcher Stijn Thoolen put 25 overwintering crew members through 16 variations of sensory stimulation at the end of their mission in 2025, varying delivery, content, duration and temperature cues. State anxiety fell by 1.7 points after nature scenes and rose by 1.0 after city scenes on a scale running from 20 to 80, with t = 4.805 and p below 0.001. Preferences beyond that split by person rather than by rule.
The psychologist Michael Varkovetski published his 12%, the difference between 54.33 seconds and 62.04 on an attention task, in an undergraduate research journal. And the medical researcher Nathalie Gerner’s feasibility study in 2025 found no significant interaction at all between cognitive state and nature-inspired design across five established EEG ratios, working with 20 people and consumer-grade equipment whose limits Gerner names.
The sources
- 22.2%higher focus, measured as the nLF/nHF ratio of heart rate variability, in an office with an artificial window than in one with no window; attention tests also ran 14.4% faster.Shuhan Liu et al., Energy and Built Environment, 2025 · 10.1016/j.enbenv.2025.03.002
- 2×as much wall decoration in windowless offices as in windowed ones, 195 pieces against 82 across 75 offices, and the windowless walls carried landscapes where the windowed ones carried cityscapes.Judith H. Heerwagen and Gordon H. Orians, Environment and Behavior, 1986 · 10.1177/0013916586185003
- −1.7points of state anxiety after nature scenes against +1.0 after city scenes, on a scale from 20 to 80, in 25 crew members overwintering at the South Pole.Stijn J. J. Thoolen et al., npj Microgravity, 2025 · 10.1038/s41526-025-00471-2
- 82%of 39 people preferred the virtual office with plants, and nobody preferred the one without; short-term memory and creativity scores were higher there too.Fariba Mostajeran et al., Scientific Reports, 2023 · 10.1038/s41598-023-34718-3
- 12%faster on an attention task after natural landscape images than after scrambled versions of the same images, 54.33 seconds against 62.04.Michael Varkovetski, Studies by Undergraduate Researchers at Guelph, 2016 · 10.21083/surg.v8i2.3057
- 20 people worked through crossover sessions in an office with nature-inspired and with urban-inspired design elements, and five established EEG power band ratios showed no significant interaction between cognitive state and environment.Nathalie Gerner et al., Brain Sciences, 2025 · 10.3390/brainsci15050432
Findings compiled by The Built Review