Sustainable development in global south contexts: children?s attentional performance in vulnerable schools with different lighting conditions.

MONTEOLIVA, JUAN MANUEL; ISON, MIRTA SUSANA; SANTILLÁN, JAVIER; PATTINI, ANDREA

Isla de Rodas

Workshop; 26th Biennal Meeting of International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development (ISSBD); 2022

ISSBD

Lighting in learning spaces is one of the most influential physical characteristics in classrooms. Studies within North America and Western Europe suggest that daylight in schools improves children?s attention, behavior, emotionality and sociability. However, little is known yet about these implications in the global south where the use of uncontrolled daylight, poor lighting and lack of improvements in light installations are permanent problems in educational vulnerable contexts. Promoting the implementation of the 7th Sustainable Development Goal about the energy use, the current work aims to study the relation between the physical environments experienced by children and their cognitive development. The main goal was to evaluate attentional performance in a monochrome detection task by two classroom cuasi-experimental instances under different lighting conditions: one considering correlated color temperature variables (CCT 6500°K - 4000°K) and the other taking into account the horizontal illuminance (Eh 300lx - 500lx). A within-subject cuasi-experiment was design for a sample of 34 children between 8 and 9 years who attended a primary public school in a vulnerable context of Argentina. CARAS-R Test was administered to assess efficacy, efficiency (FA) and attentional yield (RA) in the two experimental conditions. Results showed that in children?s FA (Z= 2470, p = .013) and RA (Z= 2385, p = 0.16) significant differences in the conditions of CCT were observed, but no differences in Eh were found. This indicates that a condition of warm light could favor children?s cognitive ability to select and maintain attention in a monochrome detection task. This study is one of the first to address this topic in a South vulnerable context. As part of a larger ongoing research line, these results are expected to be useful in future guidelines and intervention programs to promote efficient lighting condition designs in learning spaces as a way to improve the cognitive performance of children.