The demographic forecast indicates that the future increasing human population will be concentrated in world's cities wherein developed social-ecological systems emerge, which involves various challenges. It is argued that the ability to restore cognitive resources in cities is challenged by the increased amount of potential stressors, as higher degree of crowding and noise therein contributes to. To maintain good psychological health, the opportunity to restore fatigued resources is essential. Great scientific basis emphasizes nature’s fundamental ability to restore these through the many restorative properties found there, also established in the Attention Restoration Theory (ART). Studies have reinforced this theory by scientifically concluding that restoration is more effective in nature settings, or by viewing nature scenes, and even by hearing sounds that are associated with nature. However, there is an articulated need to further identify the mechanisms that support the ability to restore fatigued resources. 

Studies have highlighted various characteristics that impact the perceived restorative quality, such as the effect of soundscape. However, there is more scarce evidence regarding the social aspect on this issue, an inevitable feature in public settings. Additionally, the study of restoration might also be colored by the setting selection bias, potentially resulting in that more or less evident opposites are studied. Therefore, this study focused solely on examining the perceived restoration in a nature environment in different soundscapes, with the prerequisite that amounts of people, aiming to fill an identified research gap with a contextual integrative approach. The perceived restorativeness was tested experimentally as participants performed a cognitive fatiguing task. In different soundscapes, the participants viewed images of various density levels of people whereby they estimated their perceived restoration. By this, it was possible to determine the participants restorativeness by a quantitative research method, both by analyzing their reported mental fatigue and by examining their estimated perceived restoration. A correlation analysis was carried out to determine the relation between these estimations, showing a significant negative correlation meaning that high scores in one questionnaire relates to low scores in the other, and vice versa. 

The results showed that the participants who became less mentally tired after the experiment were those who saw nature images at the same time as they were listening to birdsong. Those listening to noise became more mentally fatigued, equally as those who viewed images in silence. Further, the result showed that irrespectively sound condition, low amount of people at site are perceived as most restorative. Overall, nature soundscape is regardless of varied density levels, perceived as more restorative than the sound condition of noise and silence, whereas noise is perceived as least restorative. From this, it is concluded that both soundscape and amount of people influence the perceived restoration, whereas low density of people and nature sound is most preferred in a nature setting to achieve restoration. Additionally, those listening to nature sound perceived themselves restored after the intervention, in contrast to those in noise and silent conditions.