Missing the Landscape for the Artefact: Higher Saliency of Built than Natural Scene Content A van der Jagt1, T Craig2, J Anable3, M Brewer4, D Pearson5 |
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1University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom |
| When compared to built environments, the visual perception of natural environments engenders a more rapid and complete recovery from episodes of mental fatigue, It has been argued that underlying this effect could be a discrepancy in the saliency level between both scene categories [Kaplan, 1995, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169-182]. In the absence of direct support for this claim, the main objective of this study was to empirically address whether attentional capture of built scene content outweighs that of natural content. To this end, a series of four experiments were conducted in which participants detected the scene category of briefly presented natural and built scenes with backward masking. We predicted that: (1) built scenes are easier to detect than natural scenes in brief stimulus displays, and (2) built objects show greater interference with natural scene detection than vice versa. Using generalized linear mixed models, we provide convergent evidence for the contention that built content results in stronger exogenous attentional capture than natural content, both at the level of the scene and the individual object. Implications for the theories in visual perception and human-environment studies are discussed. |
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