Exposure to natural daylight benefits human well-being, alertness, circadian rhythms and sleep. Many workplaces have limited or no access to daylight. Thus, we implemented a light-panel ("Virtual Sky"), which reproduced nature-adapted light scenarios. In a laboratory office environment, three lighting scenarios were presented during the day: two lighting conditions with nature-adapted spectral light distributions, one with static and one with dynamic clouds, and a standard office lighting condition. We compared the impact of the three lighting scenarios on subjective and objective measures of alertness, cognitive performance, wellbeing, visual comfort, contrast sensitivity, and cortisol levels in 18 healthy young male volunteers in a within-participant cross-over study design. We found no evidence that an 8-h lighting scenario with static or dynamic clouds during the waking day (9am-5pm) was associated with any significant effect on objective and/or subjective alertness, cognitive performance and morning cortisol concentrations compared to standard workplace lighting. However, the dynamic light scenario was accompanied with lower levels of perceived tensionafter completing cognitive tasks and less effort to concentrate compared to the static lighting scenarios. Our findings suggest that apart from smaller effects on tension and concentration effort, nature-adapted lighting conditions did not improve daytime alertness and cognitive performance in healthy well-rested young participants, as compared to standard office lighting.
Copyright: © 2023 Schöllhorn et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.