Review article: trends in the study of the psychological evaluation of landscape

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Abstract
Studies of the psychological evaluation of landscapes published from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s are summarized. Various experiments in landscape evaluation are reviewed, specifically those related to issues of sampling, methods of presenting landscapes, descriptors of appreciation, analytical methods, psychological responses to physical landscape features, and applications in physical planning. Early research on personal evaluation of landscapes and predictions of response to landscape parameters were based on relatively simple features. Subsequent model development has emphasized greater complexity with regard to photographic detail and/or the physical features of sites, such as vegetation, species type or tree diameter. Also, researchers interested in the effects of cultural background on landscape evaluation have examined the effects of subjects’ personality, ethnicity and living environment, and have considered the influence of human ontogeny and phytogeny on landscape evaluation. A long‐standing explanation for landscape evaluation has been that of ‘prospect‐refuge’ theory which derived from theories about the behaviour of animal predators, and this has latterly been supplemented by paradigms concerning the phylogenetic development of the brain.

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