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Studies developed in a scholar context report a restorative effect of nature on human beings, specifically in terms of the psychological recovery from attention fatigue and restored mental resources that were previously spent in activities that require attention. Studies usually compare the performance of children in schools with or without access to green spaces. In this study, the effect of introducing greenery into the classroom context was compared across time. The experiment was developed in two primary schools with pupils in different socioeconomic contexts, at three moments: before introducing an artificial green wall into the classroom, one month later, and one month after the introduction of vegetable pots. Results showed a significant increase in sustained and selective attention, and work memory between the experimental and the control group, notably in the third moment when vegetable pots were introduced. In the second moment (green walls), only the work memory (tested with the inversed number) showed a significant effect. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in terms of nature’s role both in terms of natural and artificial elements and the cumulative effect of direct interaction with natural elements.

BACKGROUND: There is extensive evidence that frontal and prefrontal cortex have abnormal functioning in patients with schizophrenia (Weinberger et al., 2001). For example, with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), multiple studies have shown altered activation during working memory tasks in these patients compared with controls (Adamczyk et al., 2017; Li et al., 2017). While most of the studies have been conducted in patients with chronic illness, whether these findings translate to individuals at the time of presenting with a First Episode Psychosis (FEP) is less well understood (Soldevila-Matias et al., 2018). The main objective of this study was to meta-analyze fMRI studies that have investigated the brain response to working memory tasks in patients with FEP. These data may be helpful to understand neurobiology of the longitudinal course of working memory dysfunction in patients with schizophrenia. METHODS: We included 19 studies in patients with FEP. We conducted the analysis using anisotropic effect-size seed-based d mapping (AES-SDM, https://www.sdmproject.com/) (Radua et al., 2014). Firstly, AES-SDM used the coordinates and t-values of the peaks of maximum statistical significance reported in the studies to impute a three-dimensional image of the effect-size of the differences in activation between patients and controls, separately for each study. Specifically, it assigned each voxel an effect size that depended on the spatial covariance with the close peaks, whose effect size is known. Secondly, we created a three-dimensional image of the variance of the effect size, again separately for each study. This step is straightforward because the variance of an effect size only depends on the effect size and the samples sizes. Thirdly, we fitted a standard random-effects meta-analysis separately for each voxel. RESULTS: Patients with FEP showed hypoactivation of median cingulate cortex mainly Brodmann area 32, (peak 4, 26, 40), left precuneus mainly Brodmann area 7 (peak -12,-64, 58), and left anterior insula mainly Brodmann area 47 (peak -36, 18,-12). DISCUSSION: Our results might point that FEP exhibit altered brain response in some relevant cortical regions. Nevertheless, we didn’t find any significant results in prefrontal and frontal areas in FEP, implying that may be abnormalities in patients, which are a product of degenerative process of the disease. Moreover, the small size of sample may be another possible explanation, which implies more heterogeneous results suggesting that there are no significant results in the frontal and prefrontal lobes. References: • Adamczyk, P., et al., (2017) ‘Neural circuit of verbal humor comprehension in schizophrenia - an fMRI study’, NeuroImage: Clinical. Vol 15: 525–540. • Li, T., et al., (2017) ‘Brain-Wide Analysis of Functional Connectivity in First-Episode and Chronic Stages of Schizophrenia’, Schizophrenia bulletin. Vol 43: Pages 436–448 • Radua, J., et al., (2014) Anisotropic kernels for coordinate-based meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies. Frontiers in Psychiatry. 5: p. 13. • Soldevila Matias, P. et al., (2018) Where is the abnormal brain activity in First Episode Psychosis. Schizophrenia Bulletin. Vol 44; S384. • Weinberger, D. R., Egan, M. F., Bertolino, A., Callicott, J. H., Mattay, V. S., Lipska, B. K., Berman, K. F. and Goldberg, t. e. (2001) ‘Neurobiology of schizophrenia and the role of atypical antipsychotics prefrontal neurons and the genetics of schizophrenia’, Biological Psychiatry, Vol 50, pp. 825–844.

We ask whether attentional guidance from working memory (WM) is influenced by the size of an attentional window. Participants adopted either a focused or a diffuse attentional window when responding to a search display. Prior to the search display an initial cue had to be held in memory (Experiment 1A, visual WM; Experiment 1C, verbal WM) or merely identified (Experiment 1B, identification). In all cases, search performance was affected by the re-presentation of the cue in the search display, with the cuing effects (either cost or benefit) being larger when the cue was held in memory than when it was merely identified. Critically, the magnitude of the cuing benefit increased when participants adopted a diffuse attentional window. This held for effects that are based on items held in WM and for effects that are based only on item priming. The results suggest that variations in the size of an attentional window modulate top-down (both WM conditions) as well as bottom-up guidance of attention (identification condition).