Sabine Kastner, a psychology professor at Princeton, has found that visual clutter impedes professional performance. She has learned that “visual clutter competes with our brain’s ability to pay attention and tires out our cognitive functions over time. . . . Kastner’s . . . studies found that the brain may not be good at blocking clutter. . . . The more objects in the visual field, the harder the brain has to work to filter them out, causing it to tire over time and reducing its ability to function.” When applying this research it’s important to remember that environments that are extremely stark visually are just as stressful for humans as those that are visually cluttered.
Michael Blanding. 2015. “Psychology: Your Attention, Please.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 3.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.