Chapter 2 - Environmental Perception/Spatial Cognition - Pgs 23 - 33

Question 1

What is environmental perception?

Answer 1

• The initial gathering of information. It also includes the ways by which we collect information through all our senses
• The term can also be used to include aspects of how we appraise and assess environments
• The participants often move in and around the scene; they are part of the scene
• Moving through the environmental display means that the perceiver experiences it from multiple perspectives
• The perceiver is connected to the environmental display by a clear goal or purpose - example - scanning a wilderness scene for a clean campsite

Question 2

What is spatial cognition?

Answer 2

The manner in which we process, store, and recall information about the locations and arrangements of places

Question 3

What is environmental cognition?

Answer 3

How we think about places, beyond their spatial aspects

Question 4

What is object perception?

Answer 4

The emphasis is on the properties of simple stimuli, such as their brightness, colour, depth, perceptual constancy, form, and apparent movement

Question 5

What are the ways in which environmental perception is divided?

Answer 5

1. Utilitarian purposes

2. Aesthetic purposes

Question 6

What is habituation?

Answer 6

The way people adapt or habituate to a feature of their environment

Question 7

Give an example of the Weber-Fechner law

Answer 7

As the amount of air pollution increases, larger and larger increments of new air pollution are needed before people notice that pollution is becoming worse

Question 8

What is environmental numbness?

Answer 8

Sometimes we pay very little attention to our surroundings, even if they cause us discomfort
Numbness or lack of awareness of our surroundings often arises when more lively aspects of the world command our attention
- It can cause us to overlook major problems such as air pollution etc.

Question 9

What is Herbert Leff’s exercise to get more out of any scene?

Answer 9

1. Rapidly switch your visual focus from one point in the scene to another while forming a vivid impression of each view
2. Look for views in the scene that would make a personally relevant photograph
3. Imagine what it would be like to be one of the objects in the scene
4. See inanimate objects as if they were alive

Question 10

How do researchers present an environment to a perceiver?

Answer 10

• Due to issues like lighting, weather, etc. showing the same scene to different people and asking for their perceptions is not always helpful. One person may have looked at the scene on a bright, sunny day. The next person may look at the same scene on a rainy, cold day. Based on weather alone, they could have different perceptions of the same scene
• Sometimes researchers show people videos, pictures, or soundtracks to convey information on an environment

Question 11

What are the 5 methods used to measure a person’s perception?

Answer 11

1. Self-report
2. Time sampling - report at certain intervals what they are looking at, listening to etc.
3. Behaviour-inference method - inferring something about perception from the perceiver’s behavior
4. Psychophysical method - people can reliably adjust some physical variable in direct proportion to the perception of a psychological construction. These magnitude estimations allow for the calculation of equations called power functions that express a psychological variable in terms of a known physical scale
5. Phenomenological approach - the research is the perceiver. Rather than employ many subjects, the goal is to use a single very carefully trained observer whose goal is to perceive the essence of a setting in a qualitative way

Question 12

What is a power function?

Answer 12

• An equation that expresses a psychological variable in terms of a known physical scale. In one example of this, subjects adjusted the brightness of alight to correspond to their perception of how architecturally complex different houses seemed to them

Question 13

How can 2 people have different perceptions of the same room? Example …. it’s so hot in here … no, it isn’t

Answer 13

1. Difference amongst perceivers
2. Difference in cultural background and experiences
3. Difference in perception of physical attributes such as architectural style etc.

Question 14

What characteristics of observers themselves are associated with different perceptions of the environment?

Answer 14

1. Variability in perceptual ability such as reduced hearing or vision
2. Personal characteristics - gender, education, training, experience with a setting also affect environmental perception
3. Our “way of seeing” - this is based on education or training. We learn a way of seeing that is characteristic of our chosen profession

Question 15

What is meant by the carpentered-world hypothesis?

Answer 15

• Differences in perception are due to the striking discrepancies among the perceptual environments of various societies
• Urban settings, with their high frequency of rectangular objects and straight lines, produce different perceptual experiences than uncarpentered settings, simple rural places where curved, rounded lines characterize the houses and landscape

Question 16

What is size constancy?

Answer 16

The learned tendency to stabilize perceived size despite changes in objective distance and the size of the image on our retinas

Question 17

What makes a room look “enclosed”?

Answer 17

• A room has walls, flooring, and a ceiling, which “establish space”
• Are all of the above elements perceived equally?
• Apparently, ceilings are three times as important in establishing the perception of enclosedness as floors, and that walls are twice as important

Question 18

What has happened when someone likes a colour on a paint chip, but hates the colour when it’s on the wall?

Answer 18

• Colours have different impacts when they are on a wall rather than a small chip

Question 19

List some of the perceptual illusions listed by Helen Ross

Answer 19

1. Fog makes features of the environment such as trees or hills appear to be farther away and larger than they actually are
2. The same phenomena occurs when viewing things underwater, particularly as the water gets murkier

Question 20

What is the terrestrial saucer effect?

Answer 20

• Leads mountain climbers to believe that neighboring mountain peaks equal in altitude to their own are much higher than their own
• The same effect also influences the perception of roads so that, under certain conditions, slopes that are actually uphill appear to be downhill, and vice versa

Question 21

What is probabilism?

Answer 21

It refers to Brunswik’s belief that no single cue is either a perfectly unreliable clue to the true nature of the environment, but rather has a certain probability of being accurate

Question 22

What is the Brunswik Lens Model?

Answer 22

• Used to explain behavioural research
• Perspectives about the environment are generated (observed) through a ‘lens’ of imperfect cues
• Statistical modelling is applied to determine the weighting (importance) of the various cues (independent variables) to the criterion event of success (dependent variable)

Question 23

What is Brunswik’s ecological validity?

Answer 23

• Refers to the degree of “truth” in the probabilistic relations between the environment and each of the cues
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Question 24

What is Brunswik’s cue utilization?

Answer 24

• Represents the probabilistic weights given to each cue by the perceiver, whether the cue valid or not

Question 25

Outline Brunswik’s Lens Model

Answer 25

Brunswik’s lens model applied to environmental perception. Qualities of the setting itself are not perceived directly. Rather, they are manifested in distal cudes

Question 26

What was Gibson’s Affordances Theory?

Answer 26

• Gibson believed that certain arrangements of cues give the perceiver direct, immediate perceptions of the environment
• The world can be conceptualized as being composed of substances (clay, steel, glass) and surfaces (floors, walls, ceilings)
• The arrangements of these substances and surfaces are called layouts and provide what Gibson called affordances, or instantly recognizable functions
• We do not have to interpret sensory information, construct reality, or weight cues
• Gibson’s ideas refocus attention on the environment itself
• Gibson’s perception is not composed of elemental building blocks of perception such as colour, form, and shape
• Traditional architecture emphasizes the “basis” of design, form, and shape, while users of the built environment, do not see form and shape when we see a place, we see what the place can do for us

Question 27

Explain Berlyne’s Collative Properties

Answer 27

• Environmental scenes have collative properties - characteristics that cause the perceiver to pay attention, investigate further, and compare
• Novelty - newness to the perceiver
• Incongruity - perception that something is out of place
• Complexity - a large variety of elements
• Surprisingness - unexpected elements
• Collative properties influence the perceiver’s aesthetic judgment
• This happens via 2 psychological dimensions:
  1) Hedonic tone –} the amount of beauty or pleasure experienced
  2) Uncertainty-arousal
• Relations between complexity and preference may apply only to the built environment
• Scenes of built environments show the predicted results (buildings of moderate complexity are most preferred)
• Research on collative properties has found a relationship between the property and rated beauty or preference
• Researchers have suggested additions to the collative properties list, including “that which suits a certain setting”

Question 28

What are the 4 theories of environmental perception?

Answer 28

1. Brunswik - Probabilistic Functionalism
2. Gibson - Affordances
3. Berlyne - Collative Properties
4. Phenomenology

Question 29

Explain Phenomenology

Answer 29

• Phenomenological approach results in self-report, but these self-reports differ in important ways
  1. Emphasis is on perceptions of an individual rather than on a group
  2. Try to overcome the distinction between setting and perceiver
  3. Researcher is usually the perceiver
  4. In trying to understand the meaning of a place qualitatively, as revealed by the place, rather than be resorting to external concepts or ideas

Question 30

What is topophillia?

Answer 30

Emotional attachment to a place

Question 31

What is existential outsideness?

Answer 31

Alienation from a place

Question 32

Apply Brunswik’s lens model to environmental perception

Answer 32

• Qualities of the setting itself are not perceived directly - rather they are manifested in distal cues (objectively measurable characteristics of the setting)
• Proximal cues are the observer’s subjective impressions of these distal cues
• Perceived beauty will closely approximate actual beauty (there will be high achievement)