Interactions between forest landscape elements and eye movement behavior under audio-visual integrated conditions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Suburban forest tourism is becoming the primary type of tourism throughout China. Unfortunately, little research on the interaction between forest landscape elements and eye movement behavior under audio-visual integrated conditions exists. Relevant audio-visual materials were collected from a field investigation in national forest parks in Zhejiang and Fujian provinces, China. Based on these data, eye-tracking experiments were conducted to investigate participants’ visual attention in audio-visual integrated conditions. The results revealed that participants’ attention areas under silent conditions were smaller than those under audio-visual integrated conditions. Bird twittering, insect chirping, and water flowing tended to expand the visual attention areas on immediate woody plants, humans and traffic sounds tended to expand the visual attention areas on buildings and structures, whereas domestic animal sounds promoted larger attention areas on herbaceous plants. In addition, the landscape elements affecting participants’ eye tracker indicators and subjective evaluation indicators were different in different acoustic environments. Therefore, the relationships between landscape elements and tourists’ perceptual evaluation needs to be examined in different situations.