Pleasant walking environments enhance emotional experiences and reduce brain activation - an application of fNIRS in urban studies

Promoting walking as a mode of transport is crucial to creating healthy, liveable cities. However, little research has examined how the built environment influences people's experiences, partly because of a lack of methods that directly capture this effect. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), an optical brain imaging technique, measures neurological responses by monitoring changes in blood oxygenation. Although fNIRS has been employed to compare built and natural environments, its application to studying built environments remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by investigating how different built walking environments affect participants' emotional experiences and brain activation. The environments included 1) a mixed-use residential area, 2) a mixed-use old town street, 3) a monotonous residential street, and 4) a city centre environment. An expert panel assessed their quality using urban indicators. In an experiment ( N = 51), participants watched four 20-s videos of each environment while we measured prefrontal cortex oxygenated and deoxygenated haemoglobin concentrations and collected data on emotional experiences. Results showed that pleasantly perceived walking environments (1 and 2) decreased prefrontal cortex activation, while unpleasantly perceived environments (3 and 4) produced the opposite effect. While our findings demonstrate cognitive differences between urban scenes, further research is needed to identify which environmental factors drive these effects. Overall, viewing different walking environments elicits measurable cognitive responses, highlighting the potential of fNIRS to study urban experiences. Evidence-based research on neurourbanism can inform the creation of urban spaces that promote walking and enhance emotional well-being and health. • Introducing fNIRS as a novel method to study brain responses in built environments. • Experiment on how walking environments affect emotional and cognitive experience. • Findings show differences in emotional and neural responses across environments. • Unpleasant environments increased prefrontal cortex activation; pleasant reduced it. • Potential of neuroscientific methods for designing spaces for health and well-being.