The psychological representation of molar physical environments.

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Abstract
An orthogonal set of 20 places (shown via color photographs) was scaled in 7 studies with 69 18–47 yr old undergraduates and 134 students at the University of British Columbia, representing the major scaling techniques. In this way, dimensions of environmental meaning valid across methods could be explored, and a quantitative assessment could be made of the relationships among diverse environmental attributes to test whether environmental meaning can be represented as a small set of orthogonal dimensions. All 7 scalings (e.g., multidimensional scaling of judged dissimilarities between all possible pairs of environments, and a verbal scale of the information rate of each environment), despite apparent differences in methodology and in the labels for dimensions, shared a large proportion of variance. All scalings, except information rate, predicted behavior ratings well, and the perceived similarity among places could be interpreted in terms of almost any of the perceptual, cognitive, affective, and behavioral ratings. Environmental meaning thus cannot appropriately be represented as a single small set of orthogonal dimensions. Instead, it should be viewed as involving numerous environmental attributes related to perceptual, cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to places. (68 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

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