An experimental test of the impact of avian diversity on attentional benefits and enjoyment of people experiencing urban green?space

Biodiversity may play a key role in generating the well-being benefits of visiting green-spaces. The ability people to accurately perceive variation biodiversity is, however, unclear and evidence supporting links between exposure outcomes remains equivocal. In part, this is due paucity controlled experimental studies that deal adequately with confounding factors covary biodiversity. Attention restoration theory (ART) proposes natural environments contain many softly fascinating stimuli provide visitors sense separation from their normal settings routines, switching off direct attention allowing recovery fatigue. Increased could increase these stimuli, ART therefore potentially provides mediating effect linking well-being. Here, we conduct experiment which participants virtually experience urban green-space containing high low levels avian (altered by manipulating bird song). Respondents identified contrast reported greater enjoyment treatment than diversity control. Higher did not, elicit self-reported stimulation or restoration, not perceived restorativeness scores attentional capacity (quantified using Digit Span Backwards test). were more connected nature, had following green-space. Our study rare can detect biodiversity, boosts visitor perceptions quality, increased nature connectedness show enhanced an A free Plain Language Summary be found within Supporting Information article.