Seeing the city: using eye-tracking technology to explore cognitive responses to the built environment

ABSTRACT

Context continually influences cognition and behavior, whether walking down a quiet rural street or a busy city. Research in urban design and placemaking argues that different urban environments might impact dynamic mental states, providing a framework to empirically test the role of context. Our hypotheses are that distinct contexts can influence eye movements of an individual on the unconscious level. We found that certain urban environments were associated with more positive reactions around likelihood to spend time in the place and sense that the place makes the subject feel relaxed. These environments are representative of new urbanist principles and suggest that these types of designs can provoke important cognitive responses, over more conventional urban designs.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognition
• environmental design
• biometrics
• Boston
• eye-tracking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Interestingly, in cognitive science “imageability” refers to how well a word evokes a visual image and is widely used in various linguistic analyses (Reilly and Kean 2007).

2. For non-disabled people.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center [N/A]; Research was sponsored by the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, and was accomplished under Cooperative Agreement Number W911QY-15-2-0001. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation hereon.

Notes on contributors

Justin B. Hollander

Justin B. Hollander is an associate professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning and director of the C.A.G.S. in Urban Justice and Sustainability at Tufts University. His research and teaching is in the areas of shrinking cities, Big Data, brownfields, and the intersection between cognitive science and the design of cities.  He is the author of seven books on urban planning and design, most recently "An Ordinary City:Planning for Growth and Decline in New Bedford, Massachusetts" (Palgrave, 2018) and "A Research Agenda for Shrinking Cities" (Edward Elgar, 2018).

Alexandra Purdy

Alexandra Purdy is a recent graduate of the M.A. program in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University.

Andrew Wiley

Andrew Wiley is a recent graduate of the M.A. program in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University.

Veronica Foster

Veronica Foster is a recent graduate of the B.S. program in Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Tufts University.

Robert J.K. Jacob

Robert J.K. Jacob is a Professor of Computer Science at Tufts University, where his research interests are new interaction modes and techniques and user interface software; his current work focuses on implicit brain-computer interfaces. He has been a visiting professor at the University College London Interaction Centre, Universite Paris-Sud, and the MIT Media Laboratory.  He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and he is a member of the editorial board for the journal Human-Computer Interaction and a founding member for ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.  He was elected as a member of the ACM CHI Academy in 2007 and as an ACM Fellow in 2016.

Holly A. Taylor

Dr. Holly A. Taylor is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Tufts University. Dr. Taylor's research examines the mental representation of information, sometimes referred to as mental models or situation models. She is particularly interested in the domains of spatial cognition and comprehension.

Tad T. Brunyé

Tad T. Brunyé is a Senior Research Psychologist for the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development, and Engineering Center (NSRDEC) in Natick, MA, a Visiting Associate Professor here in the Department of Psychology, and a Program Manager at the Center for Applied Brain & Cognitive Sciences. He holds over 80 publications in spatial memory, attention, working memory, spatial language and discourse comprehension, multimedia learning, educational system design, and spatial visualizations, with a particular focus on embodied cognition and mental simulation.