Human Psychological Response to Landscape Visual Filtering in Animation Design

isotropic, but rather patterned in landscape- and trajectory-specific
ways. The experiment consisted of the development of six computer
graphics fly-by sequences of three different landscapes (an agricultural
plain, a narrow valley, and a steep hill), chosen to represent differ-
ent terrain types. Each landscape was animated at low altitude in
a terrain-following mode, and at high altitude in uniform mode. In
a between-subject design, two groups of participants were asked to
evaluate and self-report their perceptions, aesthetical insights, spatial
knowledge and sense of place impressions on the three landscape in the
two altitude conditions. The results of the experiment suggest that the
visual landscape is patterned in terms of how accessibility determines
experience, since there are differences in specifically predicted classes
of responses. For example, the effect of mountain sheltering is felt only
at low altitude in a sheltered terrain, and not in any other condition.
The landscape seems to offer a different “face” (in the many dimensions
that are considered) according to the trajectory of motion from which
it is seen.
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Chapter 1
Introduction
The visual properties of landscape are a valuable resource that is
manifest, for example, in the aesthetical reaction that most of us ex-
perience by viewing striking scenery. In fact, the current interest in
visual impact and scenic quality indicates the increasing awareness of
the community in landscape visual preservation. Acquiring the abil-
ity to access the resource of landscape is as important as the actual
presence of the resource itself. Accessibility can be seen as the main
factor of an epistemological quest that underpinned the evolution of
psychological human-landscape relationships.
Landscape has been considered as “a way of seeing” (Lowenthal,
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1961). This intrinsic quality might indicate that it is necessary to
consider the process of observation as a conceptual basis for landscape.
This is especially true when observation is considered as a process of
selection of visual elements from the totality of the visible environment.
The interest in dynamic visualization can be related to the recent
attempts to find novel and more effective methods of using increasing
amounts of geographic data. Scientific visualization has brought for-
ward the idea of “seeing the unseen”, an attempt to expose the hidden
properties of data, and extracting their information content through
visual representation (Buttenfield and Mackaness, 1991). Similarly, it
is argued here that the “seeing the unseen” in a landscape context con-
sists in increasing the degree of exposure of landscape to the viewer.
The process responsible for exposing landscape is strongly related to
the dynamics of observation: it involves the selection of hidden or frag-
mented visual elements from a series of views and their combination in
integrated experiences.
It is suggested here that the trajectory of the observer on the land-
scape is critical in determining the characteristics of the experience of
landscape. However, reasonably similar trajectories could suggest to us
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how comparable sets of landscape elements give rise to different expe-
riences. Such difference will be patterned enough to help us determine
their specific influence on the observer’s perceptions. The interesting
aspects of comparing the trajectories considered in this study is that
they vary as a function of the form of the terrain. Such adaptivity is
what characterizes our trajectories as terrain-based trajectories, instead
of the other trajectories that are only an expression of independent
movement in space.
Since the interest is placed on trajectory and not on viewpoint,
the traditional approach of measuring preference using static land-
scape photographs was enhanced by means of introducing dynamic
(although passive and pre-rendered) video animation. In fact, the ani-
mated landscape-stimulus allows us to address the problem of consider-
ing the experience of landscape with reasonably effective instruments.
The better experience-inducing instrument of animation also allows us
to expand the front of investigation, which in previous studies was lim-
ited to preference and spatial cognition.
Finding evidence of the influence of trajectory characteristics on
landscape experience would assign to trajectory the crucial role of en-
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abling the access to the visual resource of landscape discussed above.
By analyzing the reactions of participants to animations it will be pos-
sible to know whether experience varies together with the trajectory of
approach to landscape, and whether such relationship varies, in turn,
with the type of landscape being shown.
The contributing elements to landscape experience are constituted
by spatial knowledge, landscape aesthetics, the emotional impact of
environments, and the sense of place by which locations are charac-
terized. The experimental framework accounts for such wide range of
intellectual and emotional facets that characterize the psychological re-
lationship between landscape and human beings.
More specifically, in the abundance of visual data available from
the landscape, the information that makes us experience an aestheti-
cal reaction is a deeply intertwined combination of visual factors. The
cognitive framework adopted in this study relates the aesthetical re-
action to the spatial information about the landscape available to the
observer.
The creation of trajectories over and on a landscape can be concep-
tualized as a filter that selects the possible ones from the impossible
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ones (humans cannot fly without technological aids such as airplanes),
and second, those eliciting specific perceptions over others. Filtering
is thus considered to be a first conceptual step in determining the ab-
stract conceptual structure that influences the epistemological access
to landscape. A filter is primarily a technological device. However, it
should not be seen as a constraint to the epistemological scope of this
thesis.
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Chapter 2
Literature Review
This Chapter will consider in sequence the history of the concept
of landscape and the theories considering landscape aesthetics (Section
2.1); the psychological approaches from ecological conceptualizations
to ideas about emotion and motion (Section 2.2); behavioral geography
concepts about spatial knowledge (Section 2.3); a review of visual de-
sign approaches (Section 2.4); the cartographic and visualization per-
spective on this research problem (Section 2.5); some considerations
about sense of place (Section 2.6); and finally some material from po-
tential fields of application of this study, and specifically cinema and
photography (Section 2.7) and planetary exploration (Section 2.8).
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2.1 Landscape
Landscape has been considered an elusive concept. The landscape
concept overlaps in part with the concepts of region and scenery. We
can approach the concept of landscape from two main directions of
investigation: it can be seen as an object, that defines a particular
physical domain and a natural system supporting life; but also sub-
jectively as scenery to contemplate from a particular viewpoint (Tuan,
1979).
Lowenthal (1961) explicitly defines landscape as “a way of seeing”,
which therefore has much to do with the viewer as with the viewed, a
mediation of the external world through subjective human experience
in a way that the concepts of region or area do not readily suggest, also
indicating an epistemological perspective to the problem of definition,
dependent on the individual who is approaching landscape.
The subjective mediation of objective reality, carried out through
“people’s eyes” (Lowenthal, 1966), means that the combination of ob-
jective and subjective takes place in the mind, or “in the mind’s eye”
(Tuan, 1979).
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Grano¨ (1929) provides an interesting historical example of how the
subjective/objective differentiation of landscape can be systematized.
He formulated a new discipline called Pure Geography, in which the
region was adopted as the basis of scientific investigation. In particular
he suggested to define regions in the environment on the basis of the
subjective and perceptual experience of the individual, thus proposing
an egocentric conceptualization of the environment. Visual, auditory
and olfactory regions were referred to a perceiving observer, thus the
subject’s experience defined the object of study in the world.
Landscape, in Grano¨’s view, was a region defined by a threshold of
egocentric distance from the observer, and extending up to the horizon,
making in practice the concept correspond to the background compo-
nent of terrain of a scene (this specific definition is not supported in
this thesis).
2.1.1 History
The history of the term “landscape” begins in the 16th century
when the Middle Dutch word “landskip”, at that time used to indicate
the works of Flemish painters, was translated into English (Lorzing,
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