Perception Mindmap
Theories of environmental perception
A crucial question in environmental psychology is how we perceive the environment and then find our way through the spaces between objects. This is a process fraught with problems as most research seems to suggest that our awareness of the environment is pretty faulty/limited in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons.
First the topic of environmental awareness can be divided into the study of environmental perception (the initial gathering of information), environmental cognition (the storing, organising and understanding of that information), and environmental appraisal (personal evaluation, emotional impact of the environment, attitudes etc). In reality I think it’s probably difficult to separate these theoretical strands. When you go round the world it seems clear that information exists from environmental stimuli and this may impinge on our passive systems, but we also seek out stimuli, based on our cognitive expectations and understandings, and these are frequently fuelled by the emotional or affective power of our attitude and value systems. It seems to me daft, or at least illogical, to partialise the process when environmental psychology states that holistic notions are central to its concerns.
Perception v "Environmental Perception"
Environmental psychologists themselves suggest that perception of an environment, (they tend to say THE environment) is different to object perception because (1) object perception is about the properties of simple stimuli, whereas environment perception is about large-scale, more complex scenes. (2) the observer of the environment is usually a part of the system being perceived and certainly moves within it, rather than being a passive outside observer. (3) Often the observer has a clear purpose in the environment – in the more naturalistic approach of environmental psychology participants are often investigated whilst doing their "natural behaviour" where and whenever they are doing it, as distinct from simply taking part in a psychologist’s experimental game.
One difficult issue in researching environmental transactions with people is that of adaptation and awareness. Often we are not "aware" of our environment, especially if it is a constant and unvarying one. This phenomenon is sometimes called "environmental numbness", and clearly raises questions about how we can sensibly ask questions of people in their settings.
Research methods in environmental awareness/perception
These tend to fall into various types of technique.
- Measures of experience. In this set of measures people are asked questions about what they have experienced in an environment. A variety of ways have been used such as self-report measures, interviews, checklists etc. The various short-comings of self-report methods are important in assessing the findings from this type of approach.
- Intervention method. Brunswik (name spelled without a "c") in 1944 suggested that people be allowed to walk through an environment, doing their everyday behaviour, but that they be stopped at various intervals and questioned about what they were looking at, doing at various stages. Some interesting findings were that most people when stopped are looking at objects less than 40m distant, and at objects less than 30 degrees from straight ahead. About 40% of objects perceived are in moving elements. You might like to consider how truly objective/useful this method is. I would imagine that after a time, when you knew you were going to be stopped and questioned you’d either find something interesting to look at, or tend to pretend some sort of intense concentration on something. I don’t think I’d give the impression that I was wandering around not paying attention to things.
- Behavioural inference methods These attempt to measure behaviour indirectly. Use is often made of pressure switches laid under carpets or in significant areas within a defined environment. These hodometers (as they are known) allow investigators to measure, crudely the behaviour patterns of individuals and groups. So you can see how many people enter an art gallery and how many stand in front of particular exhibits. Today, sophisticated computer run and analysed systems can log the time that individuals spend in places and track an "average" punter as they proceed. These days, closed circuit VT recordings can also be made to track persons or people. If you look at crowd scenes on fast forward you can get a good idea of person flow etc. But consider the ethical issues involved here. Older, less technological methods used included measuring carpet wear, the dirt discolouration of areas etc. An interesting example of enlightened environmental design made use of something like this. When the White Knights campus of Reading University was being built, the first intake of students were admitted before work was complete. The place was the usual muddy building site, and students were issued with free Wellington boots. After a term of comings and goings, the students had left tracks and trails between buildings and various places. The builders then made the pathways between the environmental elements by cementing over the well-worn areas and ignoring the more obvious geometrical path structure suggested by the architects. How many times around our own dear local world do we find ourselves cutting across the corners of grass areas etc?
Factors which may affect environmental perception.
a) Personal characteristics:
Perceptual ability. Some people suggest that women and men differ in spatial ability (for whatever reason). Nasar (1984) looked at male & female ability to judge distances to buildings that could be seen and those that were partially hidden behind other buildings. Apparently men were more accurate on this task, whereas women made less use of depth cues to answer the questions. But it is possible to argue that the task was not an interesting or important one, and that women may see the task in a different way. e.g. men tended to estimate a hidden building as being "forty five feet behind the first one which is 320 yards away." Women’s answers were more like "I guess they’re both about 300 yards away". So you might argue that the task might have different meaning for each gender, and there might NOT be an ability difference.
Experience. Familiar buildings are often judged as being closer than unfamiliar ones. When Edney (1972) asked people to estimate the size of rooms, they estimated larger sizes when initially shown the environment, and the size declined to a more realistic estimate after about half an hour or so. But we must also be careful, in that estimating distances, even to objects which we can see, is a very difficult task for most people. We just aren’t very good at it. Perhaps a better technique is to ask a more oblique question such as "How long do you think it’d take for you to walk to there?" People are usually better at answering such functional questions.
An unrelated experiential phenomenon which you might encounter is that of size and memory. If you revisit places you used to know as a child, it’s often your experience that the place has become much smaller than you remember it. I remember my junior school playground as being immense, but twenty years later it seemed very small indeed. We probably estimate size and experience size and space in relation to our physical selves, and that in turn can have an effect on memory which influences current judgments. Aesthetically pleasing buildings are often perceived as being closer than undesirable buildings.
b) Cultural effects
The Carpentered environment hypothesis. Perhaps in some ways linked to personal experience. Turnbull (1961) suggested that pygmies have different spatial abilities/understanding because their bush habitat is devoid of angular forms and perspective indicators, and that people he studied lack experience of large distances and this interfered with size constancy.
Symbolic nature of the environment and stereotyping. There seem to be interesting cultural stereotypes of space and place. Almost universally entities associated with west are better than those associated with the east. Similarly, northern entities seem to have different characteristics than southern ones. These stereotypes (or perhaps more correctly prototypes) crop up in all sorts of circumstances and seem to have very little ecological validity, but we universally seem to make distinctions of characteristics of places and people depending on the compass point. The same is also true of vertical directions. Things which are high/up are better than entities which are low/down. If you start to list words in English with good and bad connotations, the correlation with place meaning words is extraordinary. Try and think of any terms where "high/up" is bad. The only one I can muster is high rise block of flats, but that may be a special case. Again concepts associated with middle, and centre have more positive connotations than words about outer, fringe etc. (For an interesting discussion of these ideas see "Space and Place, The Perspective of Experience" by Yi Fu Tuan).
c) Environmental and other effects on environmental experience!
Ross (1974) in "Behaviour and Perception in strange environments" looks at how (in some sense) the environment influences people’s perception of itself (a REAL environmental psychology concept that).
So in fog, objects are estimated to be further away and larger than they actually are. Views through (and across) water occasionally seem larger, but are almost always seen as being further away. And the effect gets more pronounced as the water becomes less clear. Some studies of environmental aesthetics seem to show that people find views of mountains more imposing and impressive if seen behind lakes etc. Have a look in holiday brochures for mountainous countries and see how this is often used in marketing.
Sadella (1980) showed that the estimated length of a path grows as a function of the number of turns in the path. Having winding garden paths make gardens look longer. Inside houses, rectangular rooms look bigger than square rooms of the same size.
Out on the streets Korte & Grant showed that increased traffic noise decreases the visual perceptual field of pedestrians and can make them miss important and valuable cues in the environment. So you’re more likely to get lost when it’s noisy than when not, AND should you drive with the radio/CD machine playing?
Familiarity is another feature of interest. If you travel through an unfamiliar environment the journey is estimated as being longer than if the route is familiar to you. Is that why it almost always seems quicker to get home than it is to get somewhere in the first place – or is that an experience which only happens to me?
Another feature of experience is training. Generally when you investigate people’s perception of size, distance etc they are usually found not to be very good. On the other hand if you look at specialist groups this is not always the case. Studies of architects have found that they often have differing spatial conceptions to non-professionals. Architects don’t seem to have a greatly better sense of space (when measured quantitatively on estimates of length, height etc.), but they seem to be better at understanding structure and spatial relationships.
Conceptual problems.
As I’ve mentioned before, we really don’t understand the concept of space and form very well. The mirror problem (why do plane mirrors reflect left and right, but not top and bottom?) highlights the difficulty.
Many of the concepts we take for granted as being simple are not so. There may be directions (spatial relations) which are invariant, but many other spatial entities are relative - left does not exist on its own without right. Similarly front and back are relative concepts. We are particularly bad about understanding dimensions which are not straight. The world and the string problem is a good example. Imagine the world to be a perfect sphere with string tied tightly around the equator. Now cut the string and add 6 feet of new string to make the string longer. Stretch the new length of string out so that it is equi-distant from the equator. What is the gap between the string and the world? Most people suggest that the gap is very small indeed, perhaps enough to put a piece of paper underneath. If you ask the same problem but this time substitute an orange for the world, and ask people how big the new gap will be they will tend to say it will be enormous. In fact the new gap in BOTH cases will be just under 12 inches, 28 cms or so. In fact the new gap will be that distance no matter what the size of the original sphere! Most people cannot grasp this, and many even refuse to believe it even when shown the proof. I had to go home and try it out with a golf ball, a football and a beach ball before I believed it.
Theories of environmental perception
1) Gestalt theory.
Proposed around the 1930s by Kofka, Wertheimer, Kohler and others. They suggested that there are gestalts or "good forms" which exist in the world and that these forms explain how we tend to see stimuli in particular patterns or groupings. They suggested rules of forms, so that we for instance see things as "going together" because of their similarity, their closeness in space etc, and that we have a natural tendency to mentally "add" parts to incomplete forms to make whole structures etc.
2) Ecological perception (Gibson 1966)
This theory suggests our senses are in some way "wired" in to the meaning that already exists in the environment. We sense the optic array which has much information for us in survival terms and most of this is detected (automatically?) without need for higher level cognitive processing. There are many cues which we interpret to give us information, such as the occurrence of one object superimposed upon another suggests that the second object is behind the first one. Examples of automatic ecological perception are the phenomena of linear perspective, relative size, textured gradients giving estimates of distance etc. Many examples of visual illusions work by violating some of these features.
3) Brunswik (1956, 1969) Lens theory
One of the few almost exclusively environmental psychology theories. The suggestion here is that we have a probabilistic functional system. That is to say that perception is not (as Gibson says) automatic, but that learning and experience play an important part. The environment emits stimulation in a "scatter" formation. The person is the "lens" that focuses the stimuli by selection and recombination of the scatter. The result of the recombination is perception, which is then tested in some way against reality. Brunswik suggests that we get more efficient in understanding the environment as we continue to process. Various features of the world increase and decrease in salience or usefulness to us. The same stimuli may be perceived differently by different people due to their personal experience, individual cultural experiences expectations etc.
The mirror problem revisited
I was talking to someone the other night about the mirror problem. He suggested that one difficulty in understanding the situation is that the problem as formulated is wrong. Flat mirrors do not "reverse left and right and leave top and bottom alone". Mirrors in fact reverse front and back. OK so where does that get us? Well try the following if you stand on your head and look into the mirror the left/right reversal doesn’t happen. Take a piece of text and hold it facing a mirror – the text is now from right to left and reversed. Turn the text upside down and now look in the mirror. The text is no longer left/right reversed – it reads from left to right but is upside down. So now we have a situation where the mirror doesn’t reverse left to right and neither is it altering up and down, because we’ve turned the text upside down! Odd things mirrors.