Framework for Reaction to Place

Eklund and colleagues set out to learn if the design of the physical spaces people are in influences the sustainability of their online behavior.  Via an online survey they had study “participants [make] hypothetical online purchases . . . [in] rooms designed to evoke associations to hedonic, gain, and normative goal frames. . . . Preferences for the normative attribute of t-shirts increased in the normative room compared to the room with gain associations. No effect of the rooms with hedonic or gain priming was observed. . . .

Hallikainen and colleagues link sensory experiences and the ratings we give those sensations.  The researchers report that they looked at relationships between during-grocery-shopping sensory experiences and online reviews: “it could be useful for practitioners to plan the grocery store's multisensory elements such that different sensory signals are consistent with one another. . . . because customers tend to see the store as a whole. . . .

Lee and Kim’s work confirms that people respond differently to human- and AI-designed elements.  The investigators learned, in the context of fashion design, that “human-designed products are generally more favorably evaluated than AI-designed ones. Such preference was mainly because people ascribe a better intentional capacity to act and plan to humans than AI, which makes them believe humans have better design expertise. The preference for human design over AI design was found regardless of one's tendency to perceive AI threats.

Simoncelli and teammates add to our knowledge of the effects of bilingualism on the experience of color. These researchers “compared the ‘blue’ lexicon of highly proficient French-Italian bilinguals to monolingual speakers of the corresponding languages. . . .  Italian has two basic color terms for the blue area of color space: one denotes light blue hues (azzurro) and the other dark blue hues (blu), whilst French, with only one basic term bleu, lacks this distinction. . .  .

Dai and associates studied brain activity while listening to music.  They “exploratorily applied a recent algorithm for extracting the dynamic changes in time-varying functional connectivity (FC) by measuring functional magnetic resonance imaging responses from 36 participants attentively listening to an entire musical piece. A separate behavioral session served to identify the musical passages that were consistently rated as beautiful or nonbeautiful.

Loy and colleagues found, via a virtual reality-based study, that looking at scenes from space affects how awed people feel.  More specifically, “Inferr[ing] from astronauts' experiences when seeing our planet from space (i.e. the overview effect), we hypothesised that a virtual reality (VR) space tour elicits awe (i.e. an experience of extraordinary vastness associated with feeling moved, amazed and overwhelmed). . . . We compared the effect of the VR simulation to that of music, a stimulus unrelated to nature. . .