Environmental Psychology

Ch. 2 – Environmental Perception

and Cognition

Environmental Perception
• Sensation
– The relatively straight forward activity of
human sensory systems in reacting to simple
stimuli such as an individual flash of light
• Perception
– The process of extracting meaning from the
complex stimuli we encounter in every day life
– Higher-order processing of sensory inputs

Environmental Perception
• What do you see?

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 Environmental Perception
• Defn – the initial gathering of information
– The ways and means by which we collect
information through all our senses

Environmental Perception
• Contrasts with traditional perception research
– Traditional research – present individuals with
simple stimuli and can use this information to start to
understand perception of more complex stimuli (has
been termed object perception by environmental psychology)
• Goal – to carefully control all possible causes of a
phenomenon in an effort to simplify understanding
• Tend to examine perception in lab setting
– Maximum control over variables
• Emphasis on properties of stimulus – brightness, colour,
depth
• Perceiver of stimulus is normally stationary
• No real connection between perceiver and stimulus

Environmental Perception
• Contrasts with traditional perception research
– Environmental psychology – present complex stimuli
to individuals (e.g. landscapes)
• Goal – to study environment-behaviour relationships as
holistic units rather than separating them into smaller
component stimuli and response
• Focus is on large-scale scenes, treated as whole entities
• Perceiver often moves around and through scene – get
multiple perspectives
• Perceiver often connected to the environmental display by
clear purpose or goal
• Difficulty – hard to account for all of the physical and
personal influences on perception

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 Environmental Perception
• Awareness and adaptation
– Adaptation
• Weakening of a reaction to a stimulus
• Becoming accustomed to a particular degree of a
given type of stimulation
– Positive
• Environment contains much more stimulus
information than we handle
– Helps determine which stimuli to pay attention to and
which ones to ignore

Environmental Perception
• Awareness and adaptation
– Negative
• May miss important information
• Environmental numbness – when pay very little
attention to our physical surroundings even when
they cause us some discomfort
• This lack of awareness can lead individuals to
overlook major problems, such as pollution, etc.
– However, there are ways to increase one’s awareness of
the environment

Environmental Perception:
Research Methods
• Presenting the Environment to the Perceiver
– Ideally like to present live (real) scenes to
participants – this is often done
– Can’t always show a live scene
• E.g. building hasn’t been constructed yet
• Then will show photos, videos, sketches or models
of real scenes
• Can use simulations
– Simulate travel through the scene

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 Environmental Perception:
Research Methods
• Studying the Process of Perception
– How can a person’s perception be measured?
– Five general methods:
• Self-report
• Time-sampling
• Behavior-inference
• Psychophysical
• Phenomenological

Environmental Perception:
Research Methods
• Self-report
– Most common method
– Ask perceivers what they are sensing
– Include:
• Questionnaires
• Interviews
• Checklists
• Free descriptions
– Drawback
• Individual may provide inaccurate reports of his/her
perceptions

Environmental Perception:
Research Methods
• Time-sampling
– While observer is passing through an
environment ask them to report at certain
intervals (or afterward) exactly what they are
(were) looking at
– Is a form of self-report but involves active,
moving perception
• Can be used to see if pay more attention to static
versus moving elements, near vs. far elements, etc.

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 Environmental Perception:
Research Methods
• Behaviour-inference method
– To infer things about a person’s perception
from his / her behaviour
– E.g. amount time spent at exhibit used as index
of individual’s interest of it

Environmental Perception:
Research Methods
Psychophysical method

Adjust brightness to reflect

architectural complexity

Environmental Perception:
Research Methods
• Psychophysical method
– Can adjust some physical variable (e.g.brightness of a
light) in direct proportion to the perception of a
psychological construct (e.g. perception of how
architecturally complex different houses seems to an
individual)
– Can calculate power functions from these magnitude
estimations that express a psychological variable in
terms of a known physical scale

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 Environmental Perception:
Research Methods
• Phenomenological approach
– Researcher is normally also the perceiver
– Don’t use a large group of subjects
– Goal is to use a single very careful observer
who tries to perceive the essence of a setting

Influences on Environmental
Perception
• Why do perceptions of an environment
differ?
– Can be the result of a number of factors:
1. Personal Influences
2. Cultural and Social Influences
3. Physical Influences

Influences on Environmental
Perception
•

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 Influences on Environmental
Perception
• Personal Influences
– Variability in perceptual abilities can lead to differences in
perception
• E.g. impaired hearing or sight
– Personal characteristics can lead to differences
• Gender, education or training, whether like the setting, experience
with setting
– Effects of education or training
• Often learn a way of viewing the world that is characteristic of an
individual’s profession
– Effects of experience or evaluation of the environment
• Small differences in familiarity can influence perception – e.g. those
in a room for 30 min saw it as smaller than those who just entered
• More preferred buildings – more accurate perception of distance to
that building compared to a less pleasing building

Influences on Environmental
Perception
• Cultural and Social Influences
– Difference in perception can arise from being
raised in different cultural contexts
• Leads to different ways of viewing the world
• E.g. lack of size constancy in Mbuti of the Congo region
– grew up in dense forest and had little experience with
viewing objects at long distances
– Size constancy – the learned tendency to stabilize perceived size
despite changes in objective distance and the size of the image
on the retina
• Carpentered-world hypothesis – attributes certain
differences in perception to the striking discrepancies
among the perceptual environments of various societies
– E.g. urban vs. simple rural settings

Influences on Environmental
Perception
• Physical Influences
– Perception depends on the scene being
observed
– Suggested that the more scenes differ the
stronger the influence of environment
(physical setting) on perception
– When scenes are very similar, personal
factors may have more of an impact on
perception

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 Influences on Environmental
Perception
• Physical Influences
– What physical features of a scene affect perception
of that scene?

Source: HGTV.com Source: Pinterest

Influences on Environmental
Perception
• Physical Influences
– What physical features of a scene affect perception
of that scene?
• E.g. ceilings more important than floors in establishing
the perception of enclosedness
– Perceptual illusions can be created by physical
characteristics of a scene
• Fog – makes features of environment appear farther
away and larger than they are
• Terrestrial saucer effect – leads mountain climbers to
believe neighboring mountain peaks equal in altitude to
one climbing are much higher
• Rectangular rooms appear larger than square rooms

Theories of Environmental
Perception
• No single accepted environmental
perception theory
• Theories:
– Gestalt psychology
– Probabilistic Functionalism (Brunswik)
– Affordances (Gibson)
– Collative Properties (Berlyne)
– Phenomenology

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 Gestalt Psychology
• Gestalt = good form
• Holistic approach to perception
– Rejected idea that can gain further information about
human perceptual processes by breaking these
processes into smaller basic units
– The whole is not the same as a simple sum of its
component parts
• Believed brain plays active role in searching for
meaning in stimuli
– May even impose meaning where it does not exist
objectively in order to achieve good form

Gestalt Psychology
• Created laws by which we
organize small parts into
cohesive wholes
– Similarity, closure, continuity,
proximity, etc,
• Plays important role in
environmental perception
– Has had a strong influence on
architects and design professional
– Can be used to answer questions
such as, “Can a new building
façade be harmoniously joined to
an old one?”

Closure

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 http://www.house-design-coffee.com/gestalt-principles.html

Probabilistic Functionalism
• Egon Brunswik – lens model
• Believes both perceiver and environment are
important
• Environment provides a large number of cues of
which the perceiver must make sense of the
most important ones to function effectively in an
environment (functionalism)
• Only a small quantity of cues are actually
helpful to the perceiver
• Probabilism comes from belief that no single cue
is either perfectly unreliable or perfectly reliable,
but has a certain probability of being an accurate
clue about the true nature of the setting

Probabilistic Functionalism
• Ecological validity –
– the correct probabilistic relations between the environment and
each of the cues – weightings that would lead to effective
perception of the environment, if they exist and if the perceiver
knows them
– The objective usefulness of environmental stimuli
• Cue utilization – the probabilistic weights given to each
cue by the perceiver
– Based on past experience, personality, etc
• Achievement will be high when cue utilization closely
matches ecological validity (reading of environment
closely matches actual environment)
• Perceptual problems occur in unfamiliar settings,
especially if the available cues don’t resemble those from
familiar settings
• To be successful must accurately read the environment

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 Affordances
• Gibson
• Believed world composed of substances (glass, steel,
etc.) and surfaces (floor, ceilings, etc.)
• Affordances
– arrangements of these substances and surfaces (layouts)
provide instantly detectable functions
– Invariant functional properties of objects that afford
adaptation to the environment (have survival value)
• Useful properties that do not change
– E.g. extended solid horizontal surface affords locomotion

This stone
arrangement
affords sitting

Affordances
• He suggests that the perception of these affordances
don’t require interpretation of sensory information,
construction of reality, or weighting of cues
– Rather than perceiving individual cues or features that we
organize into recognizable patterns, we respond to meaning
that already exists in an ecologically structured environment
• Believes that perception is not composed on elemental
pieces such as shape, colour, and form
• Affordances are species-specific
– Affordances must be viewed from an ecological perspective
– Affordances involve perceptions of the ecologically relevant
functions of the environment
– E.g. trees – afford shelter to birds, food for some insects,
building material for humans (and other things)
• This theory has served to re-focus attention on the
environment itself as a crucial element in perception

Collative Properties
• Berlyne
• Environmental scenes have several collative
properties
– Defn – characteristics that cause the perceiver to pay
attention, investigate further, and compare
– E.g’s
• Novelty – newness to perceiver

• Incongruity – something is out of place

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 Collative Properties

• Collative properties
– E.g’s
• Complexity – large variety of items in display

• Surprisingness – unexpected elements

Collative Properties
• Collative properties influence individual’s
aesthetic judgments and desire to explore
through two psychological dimensions
– Hedonic tone – beauty or pleasure
– Uncertainty-arousal
– E.g. paintings – images of moderate complexity,
novelty, incongruity, and surprisingness perceived as
more beautiful than are images very high or very low
on these properties

Collative Properties
• Relation between preference and complexity
may apply only to built environments and not to
landscapes
– Scenes of built environments follow this pattern
– Scenes of natural landscapes don’t follow this pattern
• These ideas have prompted research to search
for properties of environmental displays that
reliably lead to particular perceptions
• Wohlhill – suggested revisions to collative
properties list
– Add fittingness – how well a certain element suits a
certain setting
– E.g. how a house suits wilderness

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 Phenomenology
• Subjective reports of personal experiences
• This approach results in a self-report which
differs in ways from the self-reports talked about
in research methods
– Rather than focusing on groups averages, focus is on
the perceptions of an individual or one individual at a
time
– Try to overcome or erase the distinction between the
setting and the perceiver
– Researcher usually is also the perceiver, although
sometimes the research asks others to help by
carefully reporting their impressions
– Try to understand the unique and holistic meaning of
a place qualitatively, as revealed by the place, rather
that resorting to external concepts / ideas

Phenomenology
• Goals
– to gain insight into the ways that people who
are in the setting view the setting, and
– to understand the relevance and meaning of a
place to those who know the place best

Spatial Cognition
• What is spatial cognition?
– The ability or propensity to imagine and think
about the spatial world
– Concerns the way people acquire, store,
organize, and recall information about
locations, distances and arrangements in
buildings, streets, and the outdoors

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 Spatial Cognition
• Processes of perception, learning, and
memory are all involved in the study of
spatial cognition
• Includes:
– cognitive maps and
– Wayfinding
• Thinking process that help people successfully
navigate through an environment, estimate
distances, recognize route cues, able to make and
read maps, and understand the relative location in
space of different places
– Video: cognitive maps

Environmental Cognition
• Think about or remember a place, with no
particular reference to its relative location
or distance
• Other E.g.s
– How farmers think about droughts
– How cognitively organize different kinds of
restaurants
– Etc.

Spatial Cognition
• Don’t process information about the
environment in the same manner as
cameras and computers
• Humans’ processing of information is full
of errors
– However, the imperfect images are still very
useful to us
• Cognition differs from one individual to
the next
– Spatial cognition in part is determined by
differences in people’s backgrounds

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 Spatial Cognition
• Cognitive maps
– Pictorial and semantic images in peoples’
heads of how places are arranged
– A mental framework that holds some
representation for the spatial arrangement of
the physical environment

Spatial Cognition
• Can you draw a map of campus?

Spatial Cognition
• Can you draw a map of campus?

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 • What elements appear to be important in a
cognitive map?

Cognitive Maps
• They are incomplete, sketchy, distorted, simplified – not
same as cartographer’s map
– Contain more than pictorial information, such as verbal
information
• Can be thought of being composed of three elements:
(Garling, et al., 1984)
1. Places – the basic spatial unit to which we attach information
such as name and function and perceptual characteristics such
as affective quality or affordances
• E.g. room, building, town, nation, planet
2. Spatial relations between places
• Distance and direction between places
• Inclusion of one place within another, e.g. a room inside of a building
3. Travel plans

Cognitive Maps
• Types of Errors:
1. They tend to be incomplete
• Often leave out minor details or paths
• Sometimes omit landmarks and districts
2. Often distort our representations of the environment
• Place things too close together
• Place things too far apart
• Misalign components
• Often represent nonparallel paths as being parallel
• Overestimate size of familiar or liked areas
3. Augmentation
• Addition of features to a map that actually are not there
(Bell, Greene, Fisher, & Baun, 2001)

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 Spatial Cognition
• Legibility
– The ease with which a setting may be recognized
and organized by people
– Can be used to design better settings
– Video: legibility
– Five elements that contribute to a settings legibility:
• Paths
– routes along which people travel
– Shared travel corridors
– e.g. roads, walkways
• Edges
– non-traveled lines
– Limiting or enclosing features that tend to be linear but are not
functioning paths
– e.g. shores of rivers, cliffs, walls

Spatial Cognition
• Five elements that contribute to a settings legibility:
– Districts
• moderate sized areas that city residents identify as having a particular
character
• Larger areas that have some common character
• E.g. Chinatown
– Nodes
• well-known points that people travel to and from, often at the
junctions of important paths
• Major points where behaviour is focused, typically associated with
intersections of major pathways or places where pathways are
terminated
• E.g. downtown square, a traffic circle
– Landmarks
• easily viewed elements
• Distinctive features people use as reference points
• E.g. tall building, a monument

• Can you identify these 5 elements in the

cognitive map you drew of the campus?
•
• Come up with examples of these 5 elements
from the city of Brandon.

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 Spatial Cognition

• Social legibility – meaning of environmental

elements, which might vary in different
cultures and result in the same place having
different legibility for different people

Spatial Cognition
• Research Methods
– Studied indirectly
– Goal – extract an accurate representation of
the individual’s spatial knowledge
– Common methods:
• Sketch a map
– Draw a sketch map of a particular area
– Can be difficult to compare across maps
» People may have different drawing abilities
» May take different perspectives or some people may
be better at taking a hypothetical perspective
• Construct a scale model
• Estimate distances between pairs of places

Environmental Cognition
• Research Methods (spatial cognition)
– Other methods
• Recognition tasks
– Ask participants to report whether they recognize photos
of landmarks that are interspersed with pictures of
unfamiliar locations
• Testing in mazes
• Use of virtual environments that have to be
navigated through
– Least used method
• Naturalistic observation of people while
wayfinding
– The process of using stored spatial information to plan
and carry out movement in the environment
– Has a lot of potential

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 Environmental Cognition
• Research Methods (spatial cognition)
– None of the methods actually yields the
person’s spatial knowledge itself
• E.g. sketch is not a cognitive map – accuracy is
limited by factors such as drawing ability, etc.
– Accuracy of methods
• Evidence is mixed
– Sometimes reliable, sometimes not (produce similar
information from one occasion to the next)
– Validity – whether method produces data that truly
represents an individual’s cognitive map
» A problem for most methods of studying spatial
cognition
– Probably best to use a variety of methods or
the most appropriate method

Influences on Spatial Cognition

• Factors that influence

– the speed of acquiring information about the
environment,
– the accuracy of this information,
– the way individuals organize the information,
and
– differences in ability to recall spatial
information
• Types of influences (factors):
– Individual differences
– Physical environment

Influences on Spatial Cognition

• Individual differences:
– Stage of life
– Spatial ability
– Familiarity with place
– Gender
– Cognitive biases

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 Influences on Spatial Cognition
• Stage of life
– Spatial cognitive abilities change/develop with age
– Early childhood – egocentric – view world as if they
were the center of it
• Perceive environment based on how close objects in the
environment are to them, whether they can touch it, and
whether it is a part of them
– Entering school
• Projective stage
• Can now adopt perspectives from viewpoints other than their
own
• Can think of settings from a variety of physical vantage
points
• Can orient using prominent landmarks

Influences on Spatial Cognition

• Stage of life
– 11 years – can think abstractly
• Now able to use abstract concepts (longitude, and latitude) or
directions (N, S, E, W)
– Some believe that the major use of laboratory studies may
have lead to an underestimation of the spatial cognitive
abilities of children
– Old age
• Some have found a decline with age, others haven’t found a decline
• In general:
– Some spatial abilities decline with age, others do not, and some may
even improve
– Older individual think about space differently than younger people
» May perform better in settings that are familiar or have meaning

Influences on Spatial Cognition

• Spatial Ability
– Natural ability in spatial cognition does not
neatly translate into better real-world spatial
cognition
– But there is some influence
• Standard psychological tests that measure one’s
ability to mentally rotate objects or find objects
embedded in a complex background modestly
predict how well people learn or remember new
settings
• Mental rotation task
• Embedded object task

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 Influences on Spatial Cognition
• Familiarity or Experience
– Knowledge about a setting grows as you
spend more time in it, which usually means
you are better able to find your way around in
that setting
– Increased experience doesn’t necessarily
mean that an individual has a more accurate
mental map of the setting, compared to an
objective map
– Wayfinding more difficult in complex
settings but experience can be beneficial
• E.g. students with less experience drew their
campus with less configurational accuracy

Influences on Spatial Cognition

• Gender
– Difference have been found between females and
males in the acquisition, accuracy, or organization
of spatial information
– Difference tends to favour males
• But doesn’t always hold true
• When does hold, may reflect differences in experiences
rather than differences in cognitive abilities
– E.g. boys often allowed to roam further and therefore have a
larger home range than girls
• Differences could also reflect level of familiarity or
differences in the socialization process rather than
biological differences

Influences on Spatial Cognition

• Gender
– Males and females seem to have different kinds of
spatial cognitions
• Men - sketch maps include more territory, more grid-
like
– When give directions give more distance estimates
– Give more cardinal direction (south, north)
• Women - sketch maps more home centered
– Rely more on landmarks

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 Influences on Spatial Cognition
• Spatial-Cognitive Biases
– Make errors in three predictable ways
1. Euclidean bias – think of world as more grid-like than it
really is
– E.g. will draw streets that don’t meet at a right angle as if they did
– Video: making sense of maps
2. Superordinate-scale bias – when thinking about locations
we are not sure of we rely on superordinate groupings
(larger categories of which the place in question is a
member)
– Can lead to errors in spatial cognition
– E.g. is Toronto further north than Minneapolis?
» Use reasoning that Toronto is in Canada, and is North of
USA so Toronto must be north of Minneapolis - incorrect

Influences on Spatial Cognition

• Spatial-Cognitive Biases
– Make errors in three predictable ways
3. Segmentation bias – relates to distance
judgments
• Mentally breaking a route into separate
segments seems to alter our distance estimates
• Estimates over the whole route, or from
segment to segment, increase with objective
distance (should), but distance estimates within
segments do not increase with objective
distance

Influences on Spatial Cognition

• Physical Influences:
– Will be examined at city scale and building scale
– City scale
• Cognition of cities improved with regular, clear paths and
highly visible landmarks
• Less errors reading a map of a city if map contained higher
degree of organization and contained salient features
– Salience harmed spatial cognition if map was not clearly organized
• Features that break up the transportation system may
interfere with cognitive mapping
• What features are learned first? – some uncertainty still
around the answer to this question
– When great distance between landmarks may learn paths first
– When there are many landmarks that standout may learn landmark
before paths

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 Influences on Spatial Cognition

• Physical Influences:
– Building scale (interior features)
• Four factors influence wayfinding in
buildings”
– Signs and numbering systems
– Visibility of the destination and views to
outdoors
– Differentiation (distinctiveness of different
parts of building)
– Configuration (overall layout of building)

Influences on Spatial Cognition

• Physical Influences:
– Building scale (interior features)
• Easier to find way through buildings with simpler
floor plans
• Signs can make it easier to get through complex
buildings
• More difficult to understand layout of buildings
that have no place from which the rest of the
building can be scanned
– Buildings better recalled if
• Taller, free-standing, distinctive in shape, easily
visible, frequently used, lot of human movement
around it

Theories of Spatial Cognition

• Theories:
– Legibility: A Physical Perspective
– Intellectual Growth and Planning: Two
Cognitive Perspectives
– The Hippocampus: A Physiological
Perspective
– World graph

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 Theories of Spatial Cognition

• Legibility: A Physical Perspective

– Emphasizes the physical arrangement of
space
– Looks at relation between legibility and the
following: paths, landmarks, edges, nodes,
and districts
– Predicts that places with high legibility are
easy to use and understand
– Principles have been used to construct:
• Cities, maps, buildings, etc.

Theories of Spatial Cognition

• Intellectual Growth & Planning: Two
Cognitive Perspectives
– Initially emphasized the role of cognition in spatial
cognition
– Intellectual growth
• Examines the way individuals develop the capacity to
comprehend space
• Largely derived from Piaget’s theory of cognitive
development
• An increased role for the environment has been
introduced into this theory
– Within each stage of development a person not only knows
different things about the environment but also organizes the
information differently
– Can’t fully understand spatial cognition until understand the
transactions between individuals and their settings

Theories of Spatial Cognition

• Intellectual Growth & Planning: Two
Cognitive Perspectives
– Intellectual growth
• Formal models that simulate the process by which
an individual makes his/her way through a setting
have begun to be developed
– Assume create regionalized, hierarchical mental
maps
– Regionalization – tend to create groups of locations
» E.g. towns within a geographic region, buildings
within a large city
– Hierarchical organization – create categories
within categories
» E.g. e.g. provinces / states within a country

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 Theories of Spatial Cognition
• Intellectual Growth & Planning: Two
Cognitive Perspectives
– Plans and Goals
• Concerned with the indirect use of spatial
knowledge
– E.g. plan a series of errands to be done in a
particular order
• Believe that people are active agents in their
transactions with settings
• Spatial activity is guided by plans and goals
• The cognitive map a person constructs will
depend on his/her plans and goals as they
travel throughout his/her environment

Theories of Spatial Cognition

• The hippocampus: A physiological
perspective
– Hippocampus is the home of the cognitive map
– Believe that:
• Some neurons within it are specifically coded for
place
• Networks of such neurons form a framework that
represents, in a 3-D Euclidean framework, the
setting known to the individual
• In humans, the portion of the hippocampus in the
left hemisphere houses a word-based map and
portion in the right hemisphere houses a pictorial
map
• Video – How your brain tells you where you are

Theories of Spatial Cognition

• The hippocampus: A physiological perspective
– Postulates two systems of spatial cognition
• Taxon system
– Guides routes person takes using:
» guidance hypotheses – specify objects or cues in the
environment that should be approached or kept at a
particular distance
» orientation hypotheses – determines how to achieve
guidance hypotheses behaviourally, e.g. turn 45 degrees
• Locale system
– Refers to places
– Place hypotheses – constructions by the brain that
organize space knowledge important to the individual
» E.g. this is a safe place

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 Theories of Spatial Cognition
• World graph
– Brain based theory of spatial cognition
– A representation of relations among situations
encountered by the individual
– A neural node is where each situation is
encoded
– Each place may be encoded in several neural
nodes

quiz

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