Dr Simon Cassidy presented a paper at the BPS PoE annual conference examining the value of self-report threat appraisal as an indicator of future educational attainment, retention, and progression in students in higher education. Threat appraisal, involving cognitive appraisal and evaluation of situational task demands versus available personal resources in high-value motivated performance situations, is conventionally measured using cardiovascular response output (heart rate for instance) as an objective measure of an individual’s response to stress. However, evidence suggests that subjective self-report measures also offer a valid measure of threat appraisal that correspond with objective measures but offer the advantage of being relatively quick and easy to administer in applied settings. Threat appraisal has previously been applied in areas such as commercial aviation, elite sport, and emergency medicine where it has been shown to predict future performance, possibly operating via a mechanism of increased anxiety and disrupted attention control. With fewer applications in the field of education, the paper offered insight into the value of threat appraisal in an applied educational context, highlighting potential implications for both future research and practice.

The Salford Applied Cognition Research Group will be hosting an interactive event at the 2023 Festival of Social Science. The event will take place at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester on Friday 27th October from 12pm – 4pm.

Activities, aimed at both children and adults, will encourage reflection on the properties that make natural environments beneficial to our mental and physical health. The event is open to all and no booking is required. More details can be found by clicking the link below.

https://festivalofsocialscience.com/events/the-power-of-nature-in-enhancing-well-being-and-facilitating-cognitive-restoration/

Written by Draco Graham-Kevan, edited by Samantha Gregory

Through the Salford Nature Environments Database (SNED) project we aim to provide a large selection of rated environmental images for research into nature restoration. Studies have shown that natural environments are restorative to both mental and physical health, and research has also shown that viewing images or videos of natural scenes can affect people in similar ways to being present in the scene themselves. Despite knowing that these natural environments are restorative, we do not yet fully understand how these restorative effects occur. Therefore, to help understand this, we need to look more at what is going on inside people’s heads when presented with these differing environments. To do this, we need to make use of images of environments in controlled lab settings.

While environmental image databases exist, there is generally a lack of standardization of the levels of the properties that have previously been attributed to the restorative effects of nature, addressing this disparity would allow more accurate conclusions to be made about why and how natural environments are restoring. Further, current databases are also generally lacking in demographic detail and sample diversity, yet we also need to know if there are individual differences in these restorative properties. We hope that the Salford Nature Environments Database can address some of these concerns.

To develop this database we first had to dive into the theory around nature restoration and decide which properties could be captured and rated. First, it is believed that we respond to environments with an immediate judgment of whether we like or dislike them. Relatedly, Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory (ART), states that restorative properties of nature are related to instant preferences towards natural imagery, as well as a person’s desire to be in the environment. Further, coherence of the environment is important, as is how much mystery there is in the environment, in terms of gaining new information through further exploration. Further work based on the attention restoration theory led to development of the Perceived Restoration Scale (PRS) of natural environments which digs further into these properties of the attention restoration theory such as fascination and compatibility. In addition, there are evolutionary theories about why we find nature restorative in terms of prospect and refuge theory which says we like environments that give a place of shelter or safety from which to explore. From these theories we therefore chose to target properties of immediate judgement, as well as properties related to perceived restoration and evolutionary theories. To measure immediate judgment, we chose to assess whether we find the environment positive or negative (valence), whether we want to approach or avoid an environment, how aroused we feel by that environment and whether we generally find the environment pleasant. To investigate the other properties we chose to assess the familiarity of the environment, how much mystery was perceived in the environment in terms of how much there was to explore, how interesting the environment was and whether a person would feel at ease in the environment (relating to prospect/ refuge).

In addition to this, we had to think about what types of images we wanted to assess and then gather these images. We wanted to have a range of images that captured the variety of natural environments from naturally formed rivers to urban parks, as well as environments across seasons and region, thus including deserts, snowy scenes, and autumnal forests. In addition, we needed a control condition that captured the built environment effectively.

To gather the images, we recruited three research assistants who were each allocated two types of images to search for. The categories searched for were natural images; caves, woodland, mountains, deserts, snowy landscapes, images containing water (rivers, waterfalls, oceans, lakes), fields, managed landscapes (gardens, golf courses, parks), and also control images containing human architecture. Images were searched for using the website Flickr, this is because Flickr allows anybody to search for images matching a certain description and filter for copyright status. For this database it was important that we only used images with a creative commons licence, meaning that they can be replicated and adjusted for use in different ways by other researchers. Images also had to be over a certain size and quality for the same reasons. We initially collected over 800 images, and then these were curated over three phases, to check for any missed watermarks or distracting features (like people or man-made structures within nature images, for example), check for any duplicates, and check that the images could be cropped and resized without losing any of the necessary qualities. These curations left the database with 500 images.

The next phase of this project was to allow these 500 images to be rated on their restorative qualities. To do this, we recruited 800 participants using Prolific’s participant pool. This allowed us to gather people from all regions of the world, ensuring that there was a more diverse and not just a WEIRD (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) sample, which is often a problem in research. Using experiment building site Gorilla, participants each viewed 100 out of the 500 images and were asked to rate each using a sliding Likert-scale system. Ratings were on the properties outlined above and on average each image was rated on each parameter 160 times, well above the necessary 41 ratings that similar databases have calculated as the minimum per image.

Preliminary results have shown that overall participants found the natural images more pleasant, approachable, and calming than the urban control images. This clear distinction of scores between the different environments provides us with evidence of their potential usefulness. The natural images seem calming enough and urban images stressful enough to be used to measure their effects in future studies. The next step is to publish an article on this database and share the images. You can keep up with the progress of the project through the OSF page.

After completing my psychology undergraduate degree at the university, I left with a keen interest in research. However, like many others, not having any ideas for what my next steps were. When I saw the GAP internship programme, I thought it would be a good chance to gain some valuable experience in a topic I was interested in, and also weigh up the options for my future. The GAP programme is aimed at recent Salford graduates and helps provide relevant experience for a chosen career. Alongside this, the GAP team provide weekly careers and development workshops and match you with a mentor and careers advisor to help you throughout the internship.

Working with Dr Samantha Gregory has been an amazing experience, with my main role being to recruit participants and collect data for a study looking at gaze cueing effects and working memory. This utilized a VR headset to place participants in a realistic setting where they completed a memory task. Engaging first hand with participants and seeing the study progress has been exciting to be a part of and something I look forward to pursuing further in the future.

I was also welcomed into the applied cognition research group and attended bi-weekly meetings, which ultimately led to being involved in a group project developing a database of nature images to be used in research involving attentional restoration. My contributions included creating a search procedure for images to be used in the database, curating the collected images for the final database, and assisting with various other aspects within the project.

As part of this, I participated in a writing retreat where we attempted to follow a paper in a day plan. We split into groups, depending on where we felt we were most useful, and managed to get the majority of a first draft written in one day.

Another task I undertook was the development of a volunteer database, this involved researchers across the school of health and society and a large part of this included altering operating procedures with hopes to sign volunteers up entirely online. I was also involved in some administrative tasks for the project including filling application forms and preparing social media advertisements.

Alongside the work tasks, I was regularly offered opportunities and experiences that I would not have been able to do otherwise. Including attending a training day for psychophysiological equipment, the North West Visual Cognition conference held in MediaCityUK and numerous talks held at the university. As well as this I was able to complete multiple online courses during the internship to aid my professional development mainly focussed around learning Python.

Overall, the internship was more than I could have hoped for and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. Finally, I want to thank Dr Samantha Gregory for the opportunity to work with her, and also thank the Psychology department for making me feel very welcome and providing lots of support over my time here.

The visual cognition group at The University of Salford is part of a wider group of visual cognition researchers in the North West, known as the North-West Visual Cognition Group (NWVC)

From July 2022 until July 2023 the NWVC are hosting 4 research seminars across universities in the North West of England funded by the BPS. This week it’s Salfords turn!

On Friday 24th March we will host the third seminar at our Media City campus. The seminar will focus on how knowledge and expertise influence the way in which we represent the world. Topics include exploration of cognition and eye movements during spectatorship of the environment, improving perception and visuomotor control in elite sport, attention and eye movements in social interactions, and visual search during navigation. More details and full schedule on the NWVC site.

Dr Robert Bendall has recently received funding for an exciting project through The Ideas Fund. Rob will be working with Oldham-based organisation Men Behaving Dadly to co-create a research project aimed at maximising the positive impact of play. Additional project partners are Oldham Play Action Group and Greenacres Community Centre. Read more here.

A key ethos of the research activity in the Visual Cognition Research group is the practice of open science. As part of this, a long with Salford’s local UK Reproducibility Network Lead, Dr Sharon Coen, the Co-Chairs of the Visual Cognition Research Group, Dr Samantha Gregory and Dr Robert Bendall, are also co-chairs of the University of Salford Psychology Open Science working group.

We promote open and reproducible research practice by working to create a community where open research practice is the norm. We offer workshops on open science practice as well as keeping this practice at the front of research discussion. We also practice what we preach by using the OSF to pre-register research studies, upload pre-prints of submitted work, and upload open data and resources related to our research.

As part of our activities, we are collaborating with other networks in the North of England, including being part of a joint ReproducibiliTea. ReproducabiliTea is a journal club where we discuss papers and ideas related to the Open Science movement. We are launching this initiative on December 15th with mince pies and festive cheer.

If you want to get involved, please contact us on local-salford@ukrn.org

For more information on UKRN, please visit https://www.ukrn.org/

Group members Dr Adam Galpin, Dr Maria Panagiotidi, and Dr Catherine Thompson presented the work of the Visual Cognition research group at the Industry 4.0 event, part of the annual Festival of Research. The audience was very different to that of the workshop in which we demonstrated the equipment, and it is great to share research with a wide range of individuals.