Our planet | Are we underperforming with more air pollution?

We know that air pollution can be bad for our health, but does it also have an effect on our cognitive performance? They studied this… with chess players.

Researcher Steffen Kunn at Maastricht University comes from economics. He became interested in the question of what air pollution does to our cognition through student research. Because if there’s a negative effect there, is that maybe also having a negative effect on the whole economy?

To find out, they needed a framework in which performance can be easily measured and compared. This is how they ended up in multi-day chess events. A big advantage of such a tournament: you have several days and different levels of pollution that you can compare with each other, you can compare performance with a chess computer as a nice baseline, and there are people from equal levels facing each other, so you can do that too. put side by side.

What they saw when they did this: More air pollution meant more mistakes and worse. The risk of errors has even increased by 26% in some cases! Read more about research here: Indoor air quality and strategic decision making.