Abstract
Background: Elements of forest landscape spaces are important media through which landscape information is conveyed. Therefore, it is very important for designers and managers of forests to explore the relationship among visual behaviour, landscape preferences, and element characteristics. Purpose: This study took forest landscape spaces as the subject, discussed the characteristics of visual behaviour and cognitive preferences for landscape elements, and analysed the relationship among element characteristics, visual behaviour, and cognitive preferences in forest landscape spaces. The findings will help designers better plan the spatial composition of forest landscapes. Methods: We collected data from 53 graduate and undergraduate students and then used Spearman’s rho correlation analysis and multiple linear regressions to analyse the experimental data. Main results: 1. As the composition of forest landscape spaces varies and landscape elements are combined in different ways, visual behaviour towards landscape elements also differs. 2. People are easily attracted by highly fascinating landscape elements, but they will spend more time on low fascinating landscape elements. 3. Element characteristics significantly affect visual behaviour and cognitive preferences. Elements with high complexity or a large proportion of elements take more time for the participants to recognize, which reduces the evaluation of satisfaction.
Highlights
The results indicate that the types and structures of forest landscape spaces and demographic characteristics can affect the evaluation of forest landscape spaces to varying degrees [14,15,16,17,18]
Based on the above results, we found that (1) when the participants observed the elements of the forest landscape, different characteristics affected their attention distribution and led to significant differences in visual behaviours, and (2) the distributions of fixation points and eye movement behaviours were obviously influenced by the overall spatial composition and the position of elements
We found that visual behaviour varied with the elements in a forest landscape space (Table 4), which is consistent with the results of Li and Cottet [23,25]
Summary
In the second half of 2020, despite the influence of COVID-19, forest tourism recovered strongly, with the total number of tourists reaching 84.2% of that in 2019. It has effectively promoted the development of forest tourism destinations and correspondingly triggered the pursuit of high-quality forest landscape [3]. The evaluation of forest landscapes has been analysed through on-site experience or photograph observation combined with questionnaires [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. The results indicate that the types and structures of forest landscape spaces and demographic characteristics can affect the evaluation of forest landscape spaces to varying degrees [14,15,16,17,18]
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