Looking at buildings or trees? Association of human nature relatedness with eye movements in outdoor space

This study explored how nature relatedness (NR) was linked with human eye movements in outdoor space. We created a 360-degree virtual reality scene that contained half urban setting of buildings and half nature area of trees, and recorded 112 participants' eye movements (total visit duration and total fixation duration ratio) during 1 min of free viewing. It was found that individuals’ NR score correlated with their eye movements on the area of interests (AOIs), i.e., total fixation duration ratio on Trees (r (110) = 0.341, p < .001). Further analyses of the correlations between three subscales of NR scale and eye-tracking data revealed that NR-Self was related to eye movements significantly, but not for NR-Perception and NR-Experience. The paired t-tests result showed that people with Low NR score spent more time looking at buildings than trees, while the High NR group did the opposite. For the medium NR group, no distinct eye movements difference between trees and buildings was detected. The outcomes shed light on the divergence of individual visual attention in a mix of natural and built environment. Our finding also determined the efficacy of NR scale with physical measurements of behavior.