Abstract:

The design of spaces affects our performance. Teaching spaces are not an exception: they can positively or negatively contribute to our cognitive capacities. Therefore, studying the different design variables involved is fundamental. Among them, artificial lighting is particularly interesting, as it is frequently used by designers and can be applied in existing classrooms at relatively low cost. Although some studies have analysed these variables, due to the difficulty of working with them, in general a reduced number of parameters have been tackled. This was the objective of the present study: to study the effect of different parameters of artificial lighting of university classrooms on the students’ memory and attention performance. For this purpose, a virtual reality study shown through a head-mounted display (HMD) was carried out with 70 university students. Regarding the artificial lighting variable, two parameters were studied: colour temperature (3 options) and illuminance (3 options). The resulting 9 combinations were implemented in a virtual reality university classroom. Memory performance was quantified through a psychological task of remembering an auditory list of words, and attention was quantified by the reaction time to auditory stimuli. Analyses indicate that the memory and attention performance is affected by some of these parameters, so they could be especially critical in the design of this type of spaces. Results may be of interest to school designers interested in optimizing the learning process of their users, and policy makers responsible for defining technical regulations on the design of teaching spaces.

Keywords:

Virtual reality, university classrooms, architecture, cognitive enhancement.