Building occupants are continuously exposed to multiple indoor environmental stimuli, including thermal, visual, acoustic, and air quality related factors. Moreover, personal and contextual aspects can be regarded as additional domains influencing occupants' perception and behaviour. The scientific literature in this area typically deals with these multiple stimuli in isolation. In contrast to single-domain research, multi-domain research analyses at least two different domains, for example, visual and thermal. The relatively few literature reviews that have considered multi-domain approaches to indoor-environmental perception and behaviour covered only a few dozen articles each. The present contribution addresses this paucity by reviewing 219 scientific papers on interactions and cross-domain effects that influence occupants' indoor environmental perception and behaviour. The objective of the present review is to highlight motivational backgrounds, key methodologies, and major findings of multi-domain investigations of human perception and behaviour in indoor environments. The in-depth review of these papers provides not only an overview of the state of the art, but also contributes to the identification of existing knowledge gaps in this area and the corresponding need for future research. In particular, many studies use "convenience" variables and samples, there is often a lack of theoretical foundation to studies, and there is little research linking perception to action.

Embodied cognition accounts posit that concepts are grounded in our sensory and motor systems. An important challenge for these accounts is explaining how abstract concepts, which do not directly call upon sensory or motor information, can be informed by experience. We propose that metaphor is one important vehicle guiding the development and use of abstract concepts. Metaphors allow us to draw on concrete, familiar domains to acquire and reason about abstract concepts. Additionally, repeated metaphoric use drawing on particular aspects of concrete experience can result in the development of new abstract representations. These abstractions, which are derived from embodied experience but lack much of the sensorimotor information associated with it, can then be flexibly applied to understand new situations.

People's physical appearance can have a profound impact on their social interactions. Faces are often the first thing we notice about people and the basis on which we form our first impressions of them. People with facial disfigurement are discriminated against throughout their lives. Currently, we do not know why this discrimination occurs. In order to develop viable interventions, we must first understand the nature of people's reactions to disfigurement. In this work, we tested the hypothesis that a "disfigured is bad" stereotype exists, wherein people attribute negative characteristics to individuals with facial disfigurement. People made judgments of individuals before and after they received corrective treatment for their disfigurement. Observers reported lower emotional valence (i.e., more negative emotion), higher arousal, and lower dominance when viewing pretreatment (vs. posttreatment) photographs. Moreover, pictured pretreatment individuals were viewed significantly more negatively in terms of personality (e.g., emotional stability, conscientiousness), internal attributes (e.g., happiness, intelligence), and social attributes (e.g., trustworthiness, popularity). These subjective judgments further reduced to people with disfigurement being regarded as less sociable and happy, less dominant, less emotionally stable, and more as objects of curiosity compared with those with corrected facial disfigurement. Our findings suggest that negative stereotype of people with facial disfigurement may drive discrimination in social, academic, and professional contexts. Knowing what inferences people draw on the basis of disfigurement will make it possible to design interventions to improve the way people with disfigurement are viewed and ultimately treated by others.

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Faces are among the most salient and relevant visual and social stimuli that humans encounter. Attractive faces are associated with positive character traits and social skills and automatically evoke larger neural responses than faces of average attractiveness in ventral occipito-temporal cortical areas. Little is known about the behavioral and neural responses to disfigured faces. In two experiments, we tested the hypotheses that people harbor a disfigured is bad bias and that ventral visual neural responses, known to be amplified to attractive faces, represent an attentional effect to facial salience rather than to their rewarding properties. In our behavioral study (N = 79), we confirmed the existence of an implicit ‘ disfigured is bad ’ bias. In our functional MRI experiment (N = 31), neural responses to photographs of disfigured faces before treatment evoked greater neural responses within ventral occipito-temporal cortex and diminished responses within anterior cingulate cortex. The occipito-temporal activity supports the hypothesis that these areas are sensitive to attentional, rather than reward properties of faces. The relative deactivation in anterior cingulate cortex, informed by our behavioral study, may reflect suppressed empathy and social cognition and indicate evidence of a possible neural mechanism underlying dehumanization.