The Influence of Visual Attention and Visual Awareness on Landscape Recovery Benefits
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Tsai, Chih-Chan
Abstract
Ever since the Industrial Evolution, cities have expanded fast and wide, studies in environmental psychology and behavior have discussed many benefits that natural environments can bring us reducing stress, restoring attention, elevating positive attitude, and aesthetic values, etc. Among all of these, the benefits of natural environment become even more important for people with hard work and fast-paced modern life. Cities with high density often try to make the streets look greener, in order to increase the proportion of natural environment, however, with such fast-pacing life, will people miss the restorative benefits that this sensual experience brings us? This study based on this question, and discussed about how the difference of awareness levels can effect a person’s restorative benefits.
Based on the above-mentioned concept, this study adopts different stimuli, different instructions to represent different levels of awareness. Experiment contains four groups, with three groups of different awareness levels, and one control group. Study using Perceived Restorativeness Scale (PRS) and Digit Span Backward Test (DSBT) as the indicators for measuring attention and restorative benefits, using National Taiwan University students as the main participant group.
Results on the PRS and DSBT show that we need a certain level of awareness to obtain restorative benefits. Even with different experiment strategies, once you give the participants to look at scenes with greenery, the attention performance will naturally rise. This study proved that human can obtain restorative benefits from natural environments through subliminal perception, and can have even better benefit if the awareness level is raised.
This study focused on daily streetscape, proved that both low and high awareness level of street scenes with greenery can improve human’s well-being. The level of awareness can influence the quantity of restorative benefits. Study reveals an approach for landscape architects to design higher restorative landscape through increasing more awareness.
Subjects
streetscape
attention
awareness
restorative experience
PRS (perceived restorativeness scale)
DSBT (digit span backward test)
Type
thesis
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