The research tackles a long-standing gap in environmental psychology. Most studies of restorative environments have focused on high-level cognitive processes: the feelings of being away, of soft fascination, of compatibility between a person’s goals and a setting’s affordances, as described by Attention Restoration Theory, or the immediate positive emotions proposed by Stress Reduction Theory. Far less attention has been paid to the very first milliseconds of visual processing, when neurons in the primary visual cortex respond to rudimentary features such as luminance, edge orientation, and contrast, before the brain has even categorised a scene as natural or urban. Wilkie and Delicato asked whether one of these low-level properties, contrast, defined as the standard deviation of luminance across an image, could independently shape judgements of a setting’s perceived restorative potential.

The team also brought a second, distinctly social ingredient into the mix: place preference. Rather than treating preference as mere liking of a landscape, the researchers framed it as an aspect of place-related social identity, a self-categorisation captured by a deceptively simple question: are you a country person or a city person? Drawing on social identity theory and on conditioned restoration theory, which proposes that we learn associations between certain environments and past restorative experiences, they predicted that people would rate settings matching their identity as more restorative, and that this congruence effect would be strongest among those who identified with nature.

Two online experiments tested these ideas with different kinds of images. In the first, 218 participants drawn from the United Kingdom, the United States, India, and elsewhere viewed forty colour photographs of natural and urban scenes near Austin, Texas, images typical of those used in person-environment research. Crucially, the researchers adjusted the histogram luminosity of every image so that nature and urban pictures were matched on mean brightness, ensuring that any differences in restorative ratings could not simply be attributed to one set being brighter than the other. Contrast was then manipulated by selecting the highest and lowest contrast images within each environment type, creating four stimulus subsets: high and low contrast nature, and high and low contrast urban scenes.

Participants rated each image on a single-item measure of perceived restorative potential, embedded in a scenario describing the mental fatigue of daily life and the desire to find places that could restore depleted cognitive resources. They also declared their place preference. The results of a mixed-factorial analysis of variance were striking. High contrast images, think of a sun-dappled scene with strong shadows, were rated as more restorative than low contrast images, such as a foggy or overcast view. Nature images outperformed urban ones. And place preference moderated the environment effect in exactly the predicted direction: participants rated settings congruent with their identity as significantly more restorative than incongruent ones, an effect that was dramatically larger for the nature-preferring group, with a standardised difference of 3.54 between their congruent and incongruent ratings.

The second study raised the stakes by changing the stimuli themselves. Instead of researcher-selected photographs, 159 participants, mostly UK residents, viewed sixty-six images uploaded by Study 1 participants who had been asked to submit photographs of environments they considered highly restorative. These participant-provided images, dubbed the ReNUE set, were again luminance-matched and sorted into high and low contrast subsets by environment type. The broad pattern replicated: high contrast and nature images received higher restorative ratings overall, and the nature-preferring majority again rated congruent nature scenes far above everything else. But two surprises emerged that complicate any tidy narrative about visual processing.

The first surprise was a significant interaction between contrast and environment type that had been absent in Study 1. In the ReNUE set, low contrast nature images were rated more restorative than high contrast nature images, reversing the overall contrast advantage, while urban images showed the expected pattern, with high contrast scenes rated far above low contrast ones. Low contrast urban images were, in fact, rated as essentially non-restorative by both preference groups. The researchers suggest that the participant-provided nature images may have depicted unmanaged landscapes that, despite their soft visual qualities, could have been perceived as unsafe, a possibility consistent with Stress Reduction Theory’s requirement that nature be non-threatening to confer benefits. The second surprise concerned the urban-preferring minority, who in Study 2 rated incongruent nature images more highly than their preferred urban scenes, echoing earlier findings that people with urban preferences tend to perceive a broader range of environments as potentially restorative.

What do these findings mean for the dominant theories of environmental restoration? Neither Attention Restoration Theory nor Stress Reduction Theory specifies which visual characteristics should trigger the positive emotions or involuntary attention they invoke. The independent contrast effect observed in both studies, small to medium in size, is therefore not predicted by either framework, but it fits comfortably within the perceptual fluency account, which holds that environments processed with lower cognitive effort are liked more and experienced as more restorative. Higher contrast stimuli have previously been linked to perceptual fluency and positive affect, and contrast is known to guide eye movements and fixations across a scene, potentially increasing engagement with the very features that later drive restoration. In this view, contrast may be one of the first visual signals that sets the emotional and attentional cascade in motion.

The methodological contribution is equally notable. By manipulating a single low-level visual property while holding mean luminance constant, the studies avoid the confounding that has muddied earlier work in which multiple image features varied simultaneously. By replicating the place preference moderation across two qualitatively different image sets and participant groups, the researchers strengthen the case that this top-down, identity-driven factor is a genuine and previously under-accounted influence on restoration research. Indeed, they argue that some portion of the reported gap between nature and urban environments in restorative studies may simply reflect the unmeasured preferences of participants, many of whom self-identify as country people. In both experiments, roughly two-thirds to nearly three-quarters of participants reported a nature preference, meaning the field’s standard samples may systematically inflate nature’s apparent advantage.

The practical implications reach into urban design and public health. If high contrast elements, bright light playing against shadow, signal wellbeing in the way that bright daylight does, designers might deliberately incorporate such features to enhance the perceived restorative quality of streets and squares. Conversely, the finding that low contrast urban scenes were rated as having virtually no restorative potential by either group offers a caution against flat, visually muted streetscapes. At the same time, the authors are careful about limits: perceived restorative potential is not actual restoration, the samples were young, English-speaking, and Western, and the cross-sectional design cannot establish causation. Future work, they suggest, should pair these judgements with physiological measures, eye-tracking, and real-world mobile assessment tools, and should move beyond the nature-urban dichotomy to include urban green and blue spaces. What emerges is a picture of restoration as a conversation between retina and identity, in which the eye of the beholder, quite literally, helps decide where the mind goes to recover.

Subject of Research: Effects of visual contrast and place preference on the perceived restorative potential of natural and urban environments

Article Title: Is restoration in the ‘eye’ of the beholder? contrast and place preference effects on the perceived restorative potential of natural and urban environments

Article References: Wilkie, S., & Delicato, L. (2026). Is restoration in the ‘eye’ of the beholder? contrast and place preference effects on the perceived restorative potential of natural and urban environments. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1572. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10110-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10110-y

Keywords: environmental psychology, restorative environments, visual contrast, place preference, attention restoration theory, stress reduction theory, perceptual fluency, social identity, urban design, nature and wellbeing, visual perception, perceived restorative potential

The review organises the sprawling literature on green and blue spaces into three interconnected domains. The first concerns environmental structural qualities, the objective features of a landscape such as biodiversity richness, vegetation complexity, spatial connectivity, the presence of water, and multisensory characteristics that engage sight, sound, smell and even touch. The second domain covers psychological mediation processes, the internal mechanisms through which these features are converted into restorative effects, including attentional recovery, stress reduction and emotional regulation. The third and, in the authors’ framing, most underappreciated domain comprises socio-behavioural pathways: the ways landscapes actively shape what people do, from walking and exercising to socialising and volunteering. It is the dynamic coupling of all three domains, rather than any single ingredient, that the model treats as the true engine of well-being.

The theoretical backbone of the synthesis draws on three complementary perspectives that have dominated restorative-environments research for decades. Attention Restoration Theory, developed originally by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, holds that natural settings engage our involuntary attention in an effortless way, allowing the depleted directed-attention system that we rely on for work and concentration to recover. Stress Reduction Theory, advanced by Roger Ulrich, emphasises a faster, more primal psychophysiological response: exposure to certain natural scenes triggers an almost immediate decline in negative affect and physiological arousal. The Stimulus–Organism–Response framework, borrowed from environmental psychology’s broader tradition, supplies the connective tissue, describing how environmental stimuli act on an organism’s internal cognitive and affective states, which in turn drive approach or avoidance behaviour. Jiang and Wu’s contribution is to slot behavioural responses into this chain not as an endpoint but as a mediating mechanism in its own right.

That conceptual move matters because a growing body of empirical work shows that what a landscape makes people do may matter as much as how it makes them feel. Physical activity is the clearest example. Greenways, parks and waterfronts provide settings that invite walking, cycling and play, and systematic reviews of urban green and blue infrastructure consistently identify increased physical activity as a major pathway linking these spaces to better cardiovascular and mental health. A park that is beautiful but inaccessible, poorly connected to pedestrian networks, or perceived as unsafe will fail to generate the very behaviours through which its restorative potential is realised. Spatial connectivity, in this framework, is not a design nicety; it is a precondition for the health benefit to materialise.

Social interaction forms a second behavioural channel with its own evidence base. Studies across four European cities have examined how neighbourhood green space shapes the social environment and, through it, mental health, while sensitivity analyses of green-space characteristics in European cities have linked specific qualities of these spaces to social cohesion and psychological outcomes. Place attachment, the emotional bond people form with particular settings, and community participation in the stewardship of parks and gardens extend this pathway further, connecting environmental design to social capital and collective efficacy. In Jiang and Wu’s model, these behavioural and social responses amplify the direct psychological effects of greenery and water, creating a feedback loop in which well-used public spaces become more valued, better maintained and more restorative over time.

The review also underscores that not all green space is created equal, a conclusion supported by experimental and observational studies alike. Research on urban green space has shown that biodiversity predicts the psychological restorative benefits people derive from a site, suggesting that ecologically richer environments deliver measurably greater gains in well-being than simplified mown grass. Vegetation complexity, the layering of trees, shrubs and ground cover, appears to matter for both perceived naturalness and restorative potential, and studies of green-space naturalness have linked it to public well-being in ways relevant to designing healthier cities. Field experiments on urban blue spaces, including within-subject designs comparing physiological and psychological responses across settings, indicate that water features confer restoration benefits that are partly distinct from those of vegetation, while meta-analytic work on blue space has catalogued the mechanisms, from physical activity to psychological restoration, through which rivers, lakes and coasts affect health.

Multisensory design emerges as another frontier. A systematic review of public urban space found that combined multisensory effects, the orchestrated interplay of visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile stimuli, can enhance restoration beyond what visual quality alone achieves, and studies in Edinburgh’s diverse urban environments have explored multi-sensory approaches to psychological well-being in green space. This has practical implications: the sound of running water, the scent of flowering plants and the texture of natural materials are not decorative afterthoughts but active components of a restorative environment. Even small interventions, such as pocket parks in densely populated areas, have been shown to influence perception, preference and psychological well-being, offering a scalable strategy for cities where large parks are impractical.

The public health stakes of this literature are considerable. The World Health Organization has formally recognised green and blue spaces as determinants of mental health, and researchers publishing in The Lancet Public Health have called for advancing the contribution of urban green and blue space to population health. Reviews of cognitive function have begun mapping mechanistic pathways from green and blue exposure to improved cognition, and studies of stress resilience in real-world settings have assessed how blue-green infrastructure buffers the physiological toll of urban life. Equity is a recurring theme in this literature: because access to high-quality green space is unevenly distributed, the health benefits documented in these studies risk accruing disproportionately to wealthier neighbourhoods, making landscape design a matter of environmental justice as well as aesthetics.

Jiang and Wu are candid about the limitations of the current evidence base, and their prescriptions for future research are among the most useful parts of the synthesis. Much of the literature remains cross-sectional, relying on self-reported well-being and correlational designs that cannot cleanly separate cause from effect. The authors argue that the field should move toward longitudinal, experimental and cross-cultural studies that incorporate objective physiological and behavioural measures, such as wearable sensors, biomarkers of stress and direct observation of park use, in order to quantify causal relationships more precisely. Cross-cultural validation is particularly important given that preferences for landscape types, perceptions of safety and patterns of park use vary substantially across societies, meaning that design principles validated in one region may not transfer unexamined to another.

For urban planners and landscape architects, the framework offers a practical checklist grounded in evidence rather than intuition. Design for ecological richness and structural complexity, not just greenery coverage. Connect green and blue spaces into continuous, walkable networks. Engage multiple senses deliberately. And, crucially, design for behaviour: provide the affordances, safety, shade, seating, water access and programming that turn a passive landscape into a stage for physical activity, social encounter and community life. The health of a city’s population, this synthesis suggests, is written into the geometry of its streets and the ecology of its parks, and the most effective prescriptions are those that treat people not as passive viewers of scenery but as active participants in the environments that heal them.

Subject of Research: Environmental psychology of how urban green and blue landscapes influence human health through psychological and behavioural pathways

Article Title: Environmental psychology and behavioral response for creating public spaces and landscapes impacting human health

Article References: Jiang, Z., & Wu, Y. (2026). Environmental psychology and behavioral response for creating public spaces and landscapes impacting human health. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1557. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10111-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10111-x

Keywords: environmental psychology, urban green space, blue space, restorative environments, attention restoration theory, stress reduction theory, physical activity, social cohesion, biodiversity, urban planning, public health, well-being