Landscape Perception, Preference, and Schema Discrepancy

An experiment is reported in which the relationship between judgments of goodness of example, interest, attractiveness, and preference is examined for a set of landscapes. Goodness-of-example judgments measure the discrepancy between an instance and a prototypical representation stored in a schema in memory. Both the type and the strength of affective responses to the environment are related to amount of discrepancy. The greater the discrepancy the stronger the affective response. The type of affective response changes with increases in discrepancy: for example, from attractive and pleasant, to stimulating and interesting, to exciting and complex, to threatening and ugly. Differences between groups in a culture are related to affective responses to discrepancy and not to differences between the schemata involved. Analyses of the sets of judgments on each of the scales for two groups with different backgrounds by means of the INDSCAL multidimensional scaling model confirms the predicted relationships between the scales and the groups. In addition, the unique orientation of the INDSCAL axes and the weights on the dimensions for each of the scales allowed inferences to be made about the meaning of each of the dimensions in relation to the landscapes, and the relations between the attributes of the dimensions and the goodness-of-example and affective scales.