Green urban space may be good for children’s brains

Children living in greener urban neighbourhoods may have better spatial working memory, according to new research by UCL Institute of Education (IOE). 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, published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology , 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 neighbourhoods. Conducted by Professor Eirini Flouri, Dr Efstathios Papachristou and Dr Emily Midouhas (UCL Institute of Education), the study looked at 4,758 11-year-olds living in urban areas in England, drawn from the Centre for Longitudinal Studies' Millennium Cohort Study. 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.