The effects of indoor plants on 3-year-old children’s word learning from shared storybook readings

Spending time in nature is good, particularly for children (e.g., Kuo et al., 2019). For example, Gill's (2014) systematic review found evidence of benefits for physical and mental health, as well as being helpful for social, attitudinal, and emotional development for children aged under 12. They also reported some evidence of benefits for cognition, although very few studies have included measures of cognition (Mann et al, 2022). There is growing evidence of learning within forest school or similar settings (e.g., Jiang, 2023). Access to good quality outdoor environments is not equitable, and there have been efforts to “bring nature inside”. For example, recent research has investigated whether bringing plants into classrooms can have benefits. Adding even a small number of plants has been found to improve the attention and wellbeing of university students (Bogard et al., 2020), and Daly et al found evidence of an improvement in student performance measures for children in Year 6 and 7 from the addition of just three houseplants. Kim et al., (2010) link the addition of indoor plants to improvements in air quality, and found that this led to better attention it the classroom. Despite the fairly convincing evidence that adding plants, or other aspects of nature to classroom settings can be beneficial to adults and children's cognition over sustained periods of time fewer studies have looked at the short term effects of plants on cognition, particularly for young children despite evidence that even minimal exposures can be effective (Mason et al., 2021). If effects are as strong as the literature suggests, and if these effects hold with pre-school-aged children, this could have enormous implications for early education, childcare settings, or even homes. The current study is designed to investigate whether word learning can be improved by the presence of houseplants in the room where children undertake a short learning activity. In this case, I plan to adapt some well-tested learning paradigms (in this case word learning from shared reading, e.g, Flack et al., 2017) in which children typically demonstrate learning gains within a single session. Parents and their children aged 36-41 months will be invited to attend the university to take part in a short study for young children, in one of two conditions. In the first condition the room will be a normal room typically furnished with office furniture, or in the second condition, the room will have several indoor plants in the space. Researchers will read three short storybooks containing a total of three novel words with matching novel objects, each featured 8 times throughout the book set. After hearing the three short stories children will be tested on their comprehension of the three novel words using a 4-alternative-forced-choice task.