https://www.notion.so/Landscape-Beauty-and-the-Human-Brain-6de4ce3ad4164b459453d5808c62bbbd
In simple terms, the issue is: how much of our perception is determined by information in the world beyond us, and how much is determined by our own mental concepts and interpretations? While most theoretical models have a necessary role for both the external stimulus and our own emotional and cognitive processes in explaining perception, the debate is around questions of emphasis or priority.
Environmental affordance → cues in the environment which aid perception and facilitate behavior
Research by Purcell, drawing on the work of Rosch and colleagues (1976), developed evidence of a hierarchically arranged knowledge structure, a ‘schema’, under which representations of the environment are stored in memory. According to this, experience of a particular landscape represents a matching between sensory input from that instance and relevant attributes of the prototypical example stored in a person’s schema. The hierarchy works at different levels of abstraction, for example, from the scale of ‘all natural landscapes’ to ‘all woodlands’ to ‘the understorey of a beech woodland’. Purcell has suggested that affective (emotional) responses reflect the discrepancy between a particular experience and the prototypical representations stored in the memory, arousing our autonomic nervous system and, depending on the degree of discrepancy, inducing pleasure or displeasure (Purcell 1987).
Grush’s (2004) ‘emulation theory of representation’ suggests that the brain constructs neural circuits which act as models of the body and environment; environmental perception results from the use of such models to form expectations of, and to interpret, sensory input.
Recent advances in technology are permitting measurement of neural responses to landscape experience in the field, as people move around different, everyday environments (Aspinall et al. 2013; Tilley et al. 2017). Although still at an early stage of development, such studies offer good prospects for a better understanding of perceptual and cognitive processes.
Landscape perception and reference
Research which supports the idea of an embodied, dynamic experience as fundamental to landscape perception challenges attempts to understand human response to different landscapes by using static, two-dimensional images alone (Heft and Nasar 2000). Much previous research in landscape perception and aesthetics has used static representations of the environment – usually photographs – to examine people’s responses to, and preferences for, different scenes. Empirical studies have shown that responses to colour photographic images can be similar to responses obtained from participants when located at the actual site from which the image was taken (Stamps 1990). Yet experimental work by Heft and Nasar (2000) has shown that participants presented with different versions of the same, mostly woodland, landscape – one based on segments of a videotape showing slow movement through the landscape, the other a series of still scenes taken from each video sequence – respond in different ways. Some of the highest ratings in this study were for ‘turn’ segments in the landscape, where the greatest amount of information change (things revealed and things occluded) occurred.
Such findings reinforce notions developed by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan (1989) about variables in the structure of the environment that are associated with landscape preference. Based on a series of studies into landscape perception, the Kaplans identified four key elements as predictors of preference: coherence, legibility, complexity and mystery. The legibility and mystery variables both point to the potential importance of navigation through the landscape (as opposed to simply viewing it as a static image), and mystery is particularly pertinent to the study just described, being a quality that draws the perceiver into the scene with the prospect of more information. A typical scene of high mystery might show a path turning out of sight in the distance around a group of trees. This quality was identified in built-environment contexts by urban designer Gordon Cullen (a ‘deflected vista’) and has been consistently associated with positive preference ratings (Cullen 1961; Kaplan and Kaplan 1989; Heft and Nasar 2000).
A further theory developed by the Kaplans has been useful in exploring why people might prefer some kinds of natural environments over more urban or built environments. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989; Kaplan 1995) suggests that directed attention, used in coping with complex patterns of daily life, including work, is a highly limited resource, easily exhausted if there are no opportunities for recovery. A ‘restorative’ environment is one that offers support for recovery and the Kaplans identify four properties that characterise such an environment: ‘being away’, either physically or conceptually, from the everyday environment; ‘fascination’ – the ability of the environment to hold one’s attention effortlessly; ‘extent’, where there is enough scope in the environment to keep one engaged; and ‘compatibility’ with what one wants or is inclined to do. The Kaplans note that the natural environment can offer each of the four factors, and is particularly effective in supporting involuntary attention or fascination, hence restoration.