The effect of emotional experiences in fieldwork: embodied evidence from a visual approach

ABSTRACT

Emotion has become an important topic in fieldwork courses of higher geography education. This study attempts to provide embodied evidence of the important value of emotional experiences in fieldwork and clarify that the teaching effect produced by fieldwork in a real environment is difficult to achieve in a virtual environment. Using eye-tracking , this study captured the eye movement data of 16 fieldwork participants and 15 nonparticipants gazing upon photographs and analyzed how emotions affect their acquisition of geographic knowledge. The eye-tracking experiment showed that students who participated in fieldwork processed visual information more quickly and had stronger emotional responses than those who did not participate. This article proposes that fieldwork can provide students the opportunity to encounter the environment in a “mind-body-environment” system, thereby constructing the following two different forms of geographic knowledge: characterizable and explicit knowledge and nonrepresentational, implicit, and embodied knowledge. The latter can be realized only via emotional experiences in the field. Therefore, this article claims that although the information age enables students to acquire remote knowledge of geographical environments through multiple channels, training qualified geographers remains inseparable from fieldwork, especially for cultivating cognition, emotions and responsibility for the “living” world..

KEYWORDS:

• Fieldwork
• emotional geography
• embodied experience
• eye tracking

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank editors and anonymous reviewers who gave comments for the earlier drafts of this paper. All errors remain our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Fixation Count: The number of times the eyeball stays in the image area represents the amount of information that participants process.

2. Fixation Duration: The amount of time participants’ eyes stay in the image representing participants’ interest in this area or information complexity.

3. Average duration of the fixation point: The average duration of each fixation point, which can reflect visual interest.

4. Pupil dilation: The normal pupil diameter was 2-5 mm. A change in pupil diameter could directly reflect the state of people’s emotions and cognitive burden (Blackburn & Schirillo, 2012). Therefore, the participants’ emotional changes can be measured by whether their pupils were dilated.

5. Heatmap: This reflects respondents’ attention distributions, offering a detailed and conspicuous mapping of the elements and features of interest, which were created by accumulating the fixation duration of all participants onto the fixation locations across regions (Rayner, 2009).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the [41701149,41871127].