Study shows pictures of cute animals can help improve concentration

Puppies. Kittens. Fat babies. These are the cute things in life
we love to coo about, but who knew that the mere sight of them could
heighten our mental skills? A new study by Japanese researchers now
shows there are more benefits to looking at pictures of these universal
delights than just getting a case of the warm and fuzzies. Afterwards,
we concentrate better.

Such is the “Power of Kawaii”, as a paper documenting the research is
appropriately titled. The Japanese word “kawaii” means cute. The paper
was published in the online edition of the U.S. journal Plos One on
Thursday. Through three separate experiments a team of scientists from
Hiroshima University showed that people showed higher levels of
concentration after looking at pictures of puppies or kittens.

About 132 university students were divided up into three groups. Each
group was assigned a different task. The first two had the most
compelling results. The first was a version of the game Operation where
participants had to carefully pick up small objects from a hole without
brushing the sides. But to also determine whether the power of cute
extends beyond care-related tasks irrelevant to helping others, another
task was purely about numbers. The second group was asked to find a
given number from a random sequence of numbers within a certain time
limit. In both, they performed the given tasks twice – before and after
looking at seven pictures of either puppies and kittens or adult
versions.

In the number experiment, one subset of subjects was given food
images like steak, pasta and sushi to see whether “pleasant” images
elicited similar effects as cute ones. The subjects were told the
pictures, which were viewed during a “break” in the tasks, were for a
separate experiment.

In the Operation experiment, the participants who were shown images
of puppies and kittens performed their tasks better after the break than
those who looked at cats and dogs. Performance scores improved by 44
percent. They also took their time. The time it took to complete the
task increased by 12 percent.

“This finding suggests that viewing cute images makes participants
behave more deliberately and perform tasks with greater time and care,”
said the researchers, according to the published paper.

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