Environmental Perception and Affect

Abstract

A model is described that links ongoing environmental experience to affective responses to the environment. In brief, ongoing experience is the result of a matching process between the characteristics of currently available particular instances and a representation stored in memory of the gist of previous similar experiences. The stored representation is conceptualized as a schema with the default values of the attributes of the schema being based on prototypical examples. The attributes of the particular instance are therefore matched against the default values in the relevant schema. Affective response occurs when there is a mismatch or discrepancy between the attributes of the current instance and the attributes of the prototype. The characteristics of the affective response will depend on the type and extent of the discrepancy. An experiment is reported that uses a set of churches as stimuli in order to investigate this model. The results of the experiment are consistent with the model, and the implications of the model for design are examined.