Bright paint makes interior-space surfaces appear farther away

Built environment color modulates autonomic and EEG indices of emotional response

Understanding built environment exposure as a component of environmental enrichment has significant implications for mental health, but little is known about the effects design characteristics have on our emotions and associated neurophysiology. Using a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment while monitoring indoor environmental quality (IEQ), 18 participants were exposed to a resting state (black), and two room scenes, control (white) and condition (blue), to understand if the color of the virtual walls affected self-report, autonomic nervous system, and central nervous system correlates of emotion. Our findings showed that exposure to the chromatic color condition (blue) compared to the achromatic control (white) and resting-state (black, no built environment) significantly increased the range in respiration and skin conductance response. We also detected a significant increase in alpha frontal midline power and frontal hemispheric lateralization relative to blue condition, and increased power spectral density across all electrodes in the blue condition for theta, alpha, and beta bandwidths. The ability for built environment design to modulate emotional response has the potential to deliver significant public health, economic, and social benefits to the entire community. The findings show that blue coloring of the built environment increases autonomic range and is associated with modulations of brain activity linked to emotional processing.

Interpersonal Distance in the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis

BACKGROUND

Mandatory rules for social distancing to curb the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic require individuals to maintain a critical interpersonal distance above 1.5 m. However, this contradicts our natural preference, which is closer to 1 m for non-intimate encounters, for example, when asking a stranger for directions.

OBJECTIVE

This review addresses how humans typically regulate interpersonal distances, in order to highlight the challenges of enforcing atypically large interpersonal distances.

METHOD

To understand the challenges posed by social distancing requirements, we integrate relevant contributions from visual perception, social perception, and human factors.

RESULTS

To date, research on preferred interpersonal distances suggests that social distancing could induce discomfort, heighten arousal, and decrease social signaling in the short term. While the protracted effects of social distancing are unclear, we propose hypotheses on the mid- to long-term consequences of violating preferred norms of interpersonal distances.

CONCLUSION

We suggest that enforcing a physical distance of 1.5-2 m presents a serious challenge to behavioral norms.

APPLICATION

We address how notifications, architectural design, and visualizations could be effectively applied to promote interpersonal distance requirements.

Senses of place: architectural design for the multisensory mind

Traditionally, architectural practice has been dominated by the eye/sight. In recent decades, though, architects and designers have increasingly started to consider the other senses, namely sound, touch (including proprioception, kinesthesis, and the vestibular sense), smell, and on rare occasions, even taste in their work. As yet, there has been little recognition of the growing understanding of the multisensory nature of the human mind that has emerged from the field of cognitive neuroscience research. This review therefore provides a summary of the role of the human senses in architectural design practice, both when considered individually and, more importantly, when studied collectively. For it is only by recognizing the fundamentally multisensory nature of perception that one can really hope to explain a number of surprising crossmodal environmental or atmospheric interactions, such as between lighting colour and thermal comfort and between sound and the perceived safety of public space. At the same time, however, the contemporary focus on synaesthetic design needs to be reframed in terms of the crossmodal correspondences and multisensory integration, at least if the most is to be made of multisensory interactions and synergies that have been uncovered in recent years. Looking to the future, the hope is that architectural design practice will increasingly incorporate our growing understanding of the human senses, and how they influence one another. Such a multisensory approach will hopefully lead to the development of buildings and urban spaces that do a better job of promoting our social, cognitive, and emotional development, rather than hindering it, as has too often been the case previously.

Wall patterns influence the perception of interior space

The texture of an object’s surface influences its perceived spatial extent. For example, Hermann von Helmholtz reported that a square patch with black and white stripes appears elongated perpendicular to the stripes’ orientation. This time-honoured finding stands in contrast with more recent recommendations by interior-design experts who suggest that stripe wall patterns make rooms appear elongated in the direction parallel to the stripes’ orientation. In a series of four experiments, we presented stripe wall patterns and varied the orientation of the stripes (horizontal vs. vertical) and their density (number of stripes per degree of visual angle). Subjects estimated the width and height of stereoscopically presented interior spaces. Stripe patterns with higher densities made rooms appear both wider and higher than did stripe patterns with lower densities or plain walls. In contrast to both the predictions from the Helmholtz-square and the design guidelines, this effect was only weakly modulated by pattern orientation, in the sense that rooms appeared elongated in the direction parallel to the stripes’ orientation. We conclude that object-based texture effects cannot be generalised to interior space perception. For a room’s perceived spatial extent, pattern density is more important than pattern orientation.