This contribution is a literature review to elucidate the role of Low Level Visual Features (LLVFs; basic structural attributes of a physical environment) in eliciting Perceived Restorativeness (PR; the sensation of recovery of human psychophysical energies that an environment can generate). Environmental Psychology has shown that environments with high PR are predominantly natural but, given increasing urbanization, is investigating what structural attributes make built environments restorative. Attention Restoration Theory (ART; Kaplan, 1995), drawing on James's (1892) traditional distinction between voluntary and involuntary attention, states that an environment generates PR when it elicits soft fascination, that is when it captures visual attention in an involuntary but not compelling manner. Based on ART, several authors (Ibarra et al.,2017; Celikors and Wells, 2009) argue that LLVFs, by attracting visual attention in a bottom-up manner, allow for a rapid scene “assembling” (i.e., division into sections and in meaningful objects) facilitating the understanding of the surrounding environment and, by this way, PR is promoted. Despite this evidence, to date, there is no categorization of LLVFs associated with PR, and the attentional mechanisms related to the phenomenon are also unclear. To clarify these issues, 53 peer-reviewed studies concerning psychophysical experiments that investigated the relationship between LLVF and bottom-up attention were revised. Two experimental lines have emerged, the first based on the Gestalt “rules of vision”, the second focusing on visual search processes (Wolfe, 1994; 2021), from which both single LLVFs (i.e., contrast in color and luminance, orientation in the space, closure, line intersections and sharpness of visual stimuli) and basic relationships between LLVFs (i.e., similarity, proximity, collinearity, and symmetry) attracting involuntary attention have been derived. The identification of these LLVFs can be a first step in creating a list of PR-associated LLVFs that can be useful in guiding the design of restorative urban environments.
Designing Regenerative Cities: a Literature Review of The Basic Structural Attributes of an Environment that Make it Restorative
Pasini M.;Burro R
2024-01-01
Abstract
This contribution is a literature review to elucidate the role of Low Level Visual Features (LLVFs; basic structural attributes of a physical environment) in eliciting Perceived Restorativeness (PR; the sensation of recovery of human psychophysical energies that an environment can generate). Environmental Psychology has shown that environments with high PR are predominantly natural but, given increasing urbanization, is investigating what structural attributes make built environments restorative. Attention Restoration Theory (ART; Kaplan, 1995), drawing on James's (1892) traditional distinction between voluntary and involuntary attention, states that an environment generates PR when it elicits soft fascination, that is when it captures visual attention in an involuntary but not compelling manner. Based on ART, several authors (Ibarra et al.,2017; Celikors and Wells, 2009) argue that LLVFs, by attracting visual attention in a bottom-up manner, allow for a rapid scene “assembling” (i.e., division into sections and in meaningful objects) facilitating the understanding of the surrounding environment and, by this way, PR is promoted. Despite this evidence, to date, there is no categorization of LLVFs associated with PR, and the attentional mechanisms related to the phenomenon are also unclear. To clarify these issues, 53 peer-reviewed studies concerning psychophysical experiments that investigated the relationship between LLVF and bottom-up attention were revised. Two experimental lines have emerged, the first based on the Gestalt “rules of vision”, the second focusing on visual search processes (Wolfe, 1994; 2021), from which both single LLVFs (i.e., contrast in color and luminance, orientation in the space, closure, line intersections and sharpness of visual stimuli) and basic relationships between LLVFs (i.e., similarity, proximity, collinearity, and symmetry) attracting involuntary attention have been derived. The identification of these LLVFs can be a first step in creating a list of PR-associated LLVFs that can be useful in guiding the design of restorative urban environments.
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