There have been many studies which explore the effect air pollution has on cognition. This time, scholars studied the performance of 121 chess players in three seven-round tournaments in Germany in 2017, 2018, and 2019.
The researchers found out that, when the air pollution was worse, the chess players performed even more poorly when under time constraint. Juan Palacios, an economist in MIT’s Sustainable Urbanization Lab, said that when individuals were exposed to higher levels of air pollution, they made more and bigger mistakes than usual.
“There are more and more papers showing that there is a cost with air pollution, and there is a cost for more and more people”, palacios says. This is just one example proving that even chess players, who think they can beat everything, can not beat the invisible air pollution.
Sparrow is here to support policymakers and cities with a tool which can help them strategies their environmental plan.
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