Human cognition and emotional response towards visual environmental features in an urban built context: a systematic review on perception-based studies

Abstract

Urban built environments can influence human cognitive and emotional comforts. Human comfort in the built environment has challenged architects and urban designers while developing comfortable spaces. Emerging cognitive-architectural studies in architecture engineering inform new directions for improvising human spatial design practices. This paper intends to present a systematic meta-analysis of selected empirical studies to identify the gaps and future scope of research in human cognition and built environments. However, the scope of the literature review is to concentrate on experiments that consider physiological reading in different environments, such as nature and architectural spaces in cognitive study areas. The peer-reviewed literature published from 2010 to 2021 illustrates that only limited design parameters are considered in these experiments. The study analyses the extensive consideration of experimental medium, simulation categories, and participant factors like gender and age in this research domain. The survey recommends considering more visual features, contextual conditions, and ethnic groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual perception
• psychophysiology
• urban design
• environmental features
• cognition
• neuroscience
• gaze behaviour

Disclosure statement

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