A person’s ability to focus on everyday tasks is affected by short-term exposure to air pollution, a study has found.
Researchers analyzed data from cognitive tests completed by 26 participants before and after they were exposed either to high levels of particulate matter using smoke from a candle or clean air for an hour.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that even brief exposure to high concentrations of particulate matter affected participants’ selective attention and emotion recognition — regardless of whether they breathed normally or just through their mouth. This can affect an individual’s ability to concentrate on tasks, avoid distractions, and behave in a socially appropriate way.
“Participants exposed to air pollution were not as good at avoiding the distracting information,” said Thomas Faherty of the University of Birmingham, a coauthor of the study. “So that means in daily life, you could get more distracted by things. Supermarket shopping is a good example… it might mean that you get more distracted by impulse buys when you’re walking along supermarket aisles because you’re not able to focus on your task goals.”
The study also found that participants performed worse on cognitive tests evaluating emotional recognition after being exposed to particulate matter.
“They were worse at perceiving whether a face was fearful or happy, and that might have implications for how we behave with other people,” Faherty said. “There are associative studies looking at short-term air pollution and incidents of things like violent crime, especially in U.S. cities. So you could kind of tentatively link those things together, possibly saying that the reason for that might be some kind of emotional dysregulation.”
The study found that participants’ working memory was not affected, indicating that some brain functions are more resilient to short-term pollution exposure than others.
Air pollution is one of the greatest environmental risk factors to public health globally. The World Health Organization has estimated that outdoor air pollution causes about 4.2 million premature deaths a year worldwide.
Researchers say the findings of the study could have significant societal and economic implications, including for educational attainment and work productivity.
“The study was done on a clinically healthy adult population, which means that they were of good health and had no clinical respiratory or neurological problems… certain other groups might be more vulnerable to effects,” Faherty said.
“Everyone’s getting smarter as time goes on because we’ve eradicated things that kill us and also we have a lot better nutrition than we did even 20 years ago. You find that things like air pollution are more important as a kind of barrier to cognitive wellbeing or IQ… because everything else has kind of been eradicated.”
The study is part of a larger project that will test the impact of different sources of pollutants, which researchers hope will help inform future policy and public health measures.
“The larger project… looks at different sources of pollutants, which are more common. So like cooking emissions and wood burning and car exhaust and cleaning products, to kind of tease out whether we can kind of push policy in a certain direction,” Faherty said.
“If we know that cleaning products are causing most of these issues that I’m describing, then we can kind of push on policy to fix the things that are wrong based on the source rather than what we can just measure in the air after the fact.”
—Olivia Lee, The Guardian
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