Psychological responses to natural patterns in architecture

Abstract

Exposure to natural environments, compared to built spaces, has been shown to confer important psychological benefits. Furthermore, people generally exhibit preferences for natural landscapes over man-made buildings. However, some forms of architectural design draw inspiration from natural systems and thus exhibit similar sensory qualities as nature itself. Can these natural features be measured, and are buildings which exhibit these features inherently preferred? Here, we examined whether subjective perceptions of naturalness in architectural scenes are driven by objective visual patterns, and we investigated whether natural patterns influence similarity evaluations and preference ratings of architectural scenes. Experiment 1 revealed that low-level spatial and color features of architectural scenes explained over half of the variance in scene naturalness ratings. Scaling and Contrast-related features were especially strong predictors of naturalness for both interior and exterior scenes. In Experiment 2, participants completed an image arrangement task and multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis was performed on the data to determine the underlying aesthetic dimensions that drove scene similarity judgements. Naturalness ratings explained over half of the variance in MDS Dimension 1 weights, suggesting that people relied on latent perceptions of naturalness to evaluate the similarity of architectural scenes. In the final experiment, participants rated architectural scenes on aesthetic preference. Nature-like patterns of Scaling and Contrast significantly predicted preference ratings. Furthermore, the effects of Scaling and Contrast on preference were mediated by latent perceptions of naturalness, indicating that these architectural patterns are preferred because they evoke intuitive associations with sensory features of nature. Collectively, these studies suggest that people may be innately attuned to naturalistic features of the built environment, and that these features can be measured using computational methods of image analysis.

The gradual development of the preference for natural environments

“…These nature preferences are fairly universal as adults' preferences for nature are found cross culturally (Kaplan & Yang, 1990;Ulrich, 1993). In fact, nature preferences are so strong that even within completely built structures, building interiors and exteriors that are perceived to be more natural are rated higher on aesthetic preference (Coburn et al, 2019).…”

Aesthetic preference is related to organized complexity

“…Numerous studies in the past several years have focused on morphological properties of our natural and artificial environment, by documenting reactions to images and pursuing to identify the features responsible for those reactions [9,10,41,42]. In this study, we created sets of images that differed in certain, pre-decided morphological features, and then recorded the reception of those images using a questionnaire.…”

“…Studies in recent years have contributed to our understanding of our interaction with specific visual features of the environment by documenting reactions to images, analyzing those images for a number of features, and analyzing the two sets of data to establish consistent correlations [41,42]. Here, we have attempted to follow the opposite course, i.e.…”

Visual features influence thought content in the absence of overt semantic information

“…As the utility of low-level visual features in designing psychologically salubrious interiors and exteriors are becoming more relevant in architecture and urban planning (Coburn et al, 2019), expanding this literature will also have immediate applications.…”