Response to congruity or contrast for man‐made features in natural‐recreation settings

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Abstract
This study dealt with people's responses to scenes featuring man‐made structures in natural settings. A set of 48 slides taken in various urban and state parks in the Northeast was selected and scaled by a set of judges with respect to the contrast or fittingness between the man‐made and the natural elements of the scene. The slides were then presented to a group of undergraduate students, who rated them on various evaluative semantic‐differential scales. In a subsidiary experiment a further group of students was shown the same slides, with instructions simply to look at each slide, exposed briefly, as many times as they wished. The results bear out the important role of the congruity or fittingness variable as a determiner of evaluative judgments, but not of free exploration time. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are considered.

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