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Environmental psychology and naPsychology 372
http://www.qsensortech.com/resources/
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Olmstead‟s Central Park: The lungs of the city
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The broad strokes
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Baltimore and Phoenix: A more nuanced story
• High canopy negatively correlates withcrime
• Low, dense bush positive correlation withcrime
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Ulrich‟s study of hospital recovery and nature v
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Picture proxy methods
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Effects of nature/urban exposure on feelings
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Environmental psychophysiology• How does where we are
influence how we feel?
– We can actually measure feelingwith simple sensors that detectmovement, heart rate, and skinconductance
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Virtual nature
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Psychophysiological measures
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Restorative effects
Increase in positive affect Decrease in GSR
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Why does nature restore us?
• Good vibrations (positive associations)
• Psycho-evolutionary accounts
• Attention restoration
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Accounts based on positive associations
• There may be some merit to this
• Simple verbal descriptions of natureproduce some positive effects on mood
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Psycho-evolutionary accounts: Orians & Heerw
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People from a wide variety of backgrounds presavannah-like settings
• This seems true even if we are unlikely to have experienced them
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Attention restoration theory
• Urban environments encourage focal attention
• Focal attention requires cognitive effort
• Natural settings produce „fascination‟ and release us from effortful attention
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Patterns of eye movement
High fascination Low fascination
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But there must be more to it….
• It doesn‟t seem plausible that simple release from cognitive effort is responsi
the positive effects of nature exposure
• Difficult to see follow-through from patterns of eye movements to shorter hos
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Some have tried to figure out exactly what in nimages matters
Fractals – patterns of self-similarit-eg patterns preserved a
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Fractal dimension is a mathematical measure similarity
• Fractal dimension of natural scenes is around 1.5
• Fractal dimensions of eye movements can also be measured – also around 1
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Another way of looking at visual perception
• There are no identified “fractal
detectors”
• But there are “spatial frequencydetectors”
• -any visual image is composed ofinformation at a range of scales
• Our visual system is more sensitive to
some than to others• Different parts of our brain are more or
less sensitive to particular ranges ofspatial frequency
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The summary
• Exposure to nature has many benefits
• Several theories try to account for these effects
• We may be at least zero-ing in on parts of the mechanism for this effect
• If current findings hold up, it suggests that all kinds of designs (and not just nmight be good for body and mind