Establishing reference scales for scene naturalness and openness : Naturalness and openness scales

Landscape Preference: The Role of Attractiveness and Spatial Openness of the Environment

To live a healthy lifestyle, urban residents need contact with nature and restoration in a natural environment. Environmental psychology has investigated the types and features of natural environments that could be optimal for restoration. Using a sample of undergraduates from the Czech Republic, the present study explored whether attractive and open natural environments are liked more and perceived as more restorative than unattractive and closed environments. Furthermore, this study explored which spatio-cognitive dimensions and emotional qualities of the environments are associated with the liking and perceived restoration of the environments. It was found that attractive and open environments were liked significantly more and had a significantly higher level of perceived restoration than attractive closed environments, but in the nonattractive environments, the openness of the environments had no significant effects on liking and perceived restoration. Although we only found a significant contribution of the spatio-cognitive dimension of mystery to liking and perceived restoration, emotional qualities of the environment were a good predictor for the liking and perceived restoration of natural environments. The effects of the aesthetic qualities of images and the photographic techniques used should also be considered. The results are discussed in connection with the fact that preference for attractive landscapes may lead to an underestimation of the value of ordinary nature in neighborhoods.

Relating Sound and Sight in Simulated Environments

The auditory signals at the ear can be affected by components arriving both directly from a sound source and indirectly via environmental reverberation. Previous studies have suggested that the perceptual separation of these contributions can be aided by expectations of likely reverberant qualities. Here, we investigated whether vision can provide information about the auditory properties of physical locations that could also be used to develop such expectations. We presented participants with audiovisual stimuli derived from 10 simulated real-world locations via a head-mounted display (HMD; n = 44) or a web-based ( n = 60) delivery method. On each trial, participants viewed a first-person perspective rendering of a location before hearing a spoken utterance that was convolved with an impulse response that was from a location that was either the same as (congruent) or different to (incongruent) the visually-depicted location. We find that audiovisual congruence was associated with an increase in the probability of participants reporting an audiovisual match of about 0.22 (95% credible interval: [ 0.17 , 0.27 ]), and that participants were more likely to confuse audiovisual pairs as matching if their locations had similar reverberation times. Overall, this study suggests that human perceivers have a capacity to form expectations of reverberation from visual information. Such expectations may be useful for the perceptual challenge of separating sound sources and reverberation from within the signal available at the ear.

Early Electrophysiological Markers of Navigational Affordances in Scenes

Scene perception and spatial navigation are interdependent cognitive functions, and there is increasing evidence that cortical areas that process perceptual scene properties also carry information about the potential for navigation in the environment (navigational affordances). However, the temporal stages by which visual information is transformed into navigationally relevant information are not yet known. We hypothesized that navigational affordances are encoded during perceptual processing and therefore should modulate early visually evoked ERPs, especially the scene-selective P2 component. To test this idea, we recorded ERPs from participants while they passively viewed computer-generated room scenes matched in visual complexity. By simply changing the number of doors (no doors, 1 door, 2 doors, 3 doors), we were able to systematically vary the number of pathways that afford movement in the local environment, while keeping the overall size and shape of the environment constant. We found that rooms with no doors evoked a higher P2 response than rooms with three doors, consistent with prior research reporting higher P2 amplitude to closed relative to open scenes. Moreover, we found P2 amplitude scaled linearly with the number of doors in the scenes. Navigability effects on the ERP waveform were also observed in a multivariate analysis, which showed significant decoding of the number of doors and their location at earlier time windows. Together, our results suggest that navigational affordances are represented in the early stages of scene perception. This complements research showing that the occipital place area automatically encodes the structure of navigable space and strengthens the link between scene perception and navigation.

Validating Visual Stimuli of Nature Images and Identifying the Representative Characteristics

This study fills a void in the literature by both validating images of nature for use in future research experiments and examining which characteristics of these visual stimuli are found to be most representative of nature. We utilized a convenience sample of university students to assess 129 different nature images on which best represented nature. Participants (n = 40) viewed one image per question (n = 129) and were asked to rate images using a 5-point Likert scale, with the anchors “best represents nature” (5) and “least represents nature” (1). Average ratings across participants were calculated for each image. Canopies, mountains, bodies of water, and unnatural elements were identified as semantic categories of interest, as well as atmospheric perspectives and close-range views. We conducted the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and the ordered logistic regression analyses to identify semantic categories highly representative of nature, controlling for the presence/absence of other semantic categories. The results showed that canopies, bodies of water, and mountains were found to be highly representative of nature, whereas unnatural elements and close-range views were inversely related. Understanding semantic categories most representative of nature is useful in developing nature-centered interventions in behavioral performance research and other neuroimaging modalities. All images are housed in an online repository and we welcome the use of the final 10 highly representative nature images by other researchers, which will hopefully prompt and expedite future examinations of nature across multiple research formats.

Greenway Cyclists' Visual Perception and Landscape Imagery Assessment

Greenway is a kind of corridors in the city that takes natural elements as the main constituent foundation and connects open spaces with functions such as leisure and recreation. The assessment of the built greenway is a review of the past construction experiences, and it is also a supplement and improvement to the future greenway planning concept system, which has important academic and application value. This study will explore how greenway design factors influenced the local cyclists' perception of the landscape using on-site questionnaire and photo rating method. The results indicated that greenways with continuous cycling paths, high security awareness, open landscapes, and rich human activities evoke positive perceptions. Among the visual elements, natural elements such as plants and sky are more favorable than artificial elements. The research results show that the formation of greenway cyclists' landscape imagery is affected by visual perception elements, which suggests that special consideration should be given to the laws of cyclists' mental perception when designing greenways.