Visual context of nature and urban environments and their ability to distract from a task at hand

Exposure to nature is generally accepted to benefit people’s cognition, health, and wellbeing compared to exposure to urban areas; an effect that can even be seen when exposed to visual images only. This data set contains data of 2 experiments in which participants performed a shape-discrimination task in the presence of task-irrelevant nature and urban scenes to explore what underlies these differences in cognitive demands: low-level image statistics, higher-level perceptual factors such as an environment’s aesthetic or comfort properties, or an environment’s gist? Findings suggest that visual properties of task-irrelevant information affect distractibility in a hierarchical manner, with semantic information of task-irrelevant scenes having the highest impact.