Effects of Indoor Plants on Human Functions: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analyses

What the study found

The review generally favored plant presence for objective human-function outcomes, with significant pooled effects for some outcomes but limited studies per meta-analysis.

Limitations

Many pooled outcomes relied on only two or three studies; plant dose and exposure protocols varied.

Neurodesign interpretation

Plants are one of the few biophilic interventions that can be directly manipulated indoors, but the evidence is much thinner than their design popularity suggests.

Possible design implications

Treat plant quantity, visibility and maintenance as dose variables and test them, rather than using plant presence as a binary label.

Why it stays in the corpus

Retain for the best current quantitative synthesis of indoor-plant effects.

Study design

Systematic review; meta-analyses on 16 records

Population

Humans across 42 records

Setting

Indoor environments

Field

Biophilic design

Mechanism

Physiological relaxation, cognition

Spatial variable

Indoor plants, visible greenness

Keywords

indoor plants, biophilia, cognition, physiology, meta-analysis