The effect of visual attention process and thinking styles on environmental aesthetic preference: An eye-tracking study

Abstract

People often form different aesthetic preferences for natural and built environments, which affects their behavioral intention; however, it remains unknown whether this difference in aesthetic preference is due to differences in thinking styles. However, whether tourists’ aesthetic preferences differ when using different visual attention processes has not been studied further. This study used eye-tracking and self-reporting to investigate these questions. The results show that natural environment images are more favored visually because they can evoke in tourists larger pupil diameters and longer scan paths, but we found no significant difference in fixation duration and fixation counts. We also found that the scanning path of tourists who predominantly rely on intuitive thinking is modulated by the bottom-up attention process, while the scanning path of tourists who prefer rational thinking is modulated by the top-down attention process. In the bottom-up process, tourists who prefer rational thinking exhibit more positive aesthetic preferences and emotional arousal. In summary, the present study verified that aesthetic preference is more likely to be influenced by both thinking style and visual attention processing. The results of the present work provide preliminary evidence that the aesthetic preference of the environment is not only related to visual attention but also affected by the individual visual attention process and thinking style.

Design Element Preferences in Public Facilities: An Eye Tracking Study

“…Through the existing literature, current empirical research guided by stress recovery theory (SRT) [34] and attention restoration theory (ART) [35] has focused on stimulus-driven bottom-up processes while experiencing nature. However, a comprehensive evaluation of the signage system is based on the bottom-up visual gaze process and the top-down subjective preference factor, and the correlation between the two deserves further study [36].…”

Multimodal Quantitative Research on the Emotional Attachment Characteristics between People and the Built Environment Based on the Immersive VR Eye-Tracking Experiment

“…For example, it has been proven that different components of a landscape image would influence its ranking during the evaluation [54,[56][57][58]. Images that contain more greenery tend to rank higher and are more likely to be favored [59]. Buildings, animals and other artificial objects may also affect how people feel about the landscape [29,60,61].…”