Architectural design and the brain: Effects of ceiling height and perceived enclosure on beauty judgments and approach-avoidance decisions
Introduction
In this study we examined the effects of ceiling height and perceived enclosure on aesthetic judgments and approach-avoidance decisions in architectural design. According to the US National Building Code, the standard ceiling height is eight feet or 2.44 m (Rybczynski, 2009). Nevertheless, it appears that people tend to prefer ceilings that are about two feet (.61 m) higher than this standard. For example, in a series of experiments Baird, Cassidy, and Kurr (1978) demonstrated a single-peak preference function relating ceiling height to preference for rooms—increasing monotonically from 6 feet (1.83 m) to a peak at 10 feet (3.04 m), and decreasing thereafter. Interestingly, the same general function emerged regardless of whether the participants were examining model rooms, or when they stood under adjustable ceilings for a more realistic experience of ceiling height. However, the preferred height of a ceiling also varied as a function of the imagined activity of the occupant within the room. Specifically, participants preferred higher ceilings for the activity of listening than reading, dancing, dining and talking. Nevertheless, despite substantial individual differences in preference and contextual effects, the main effect of ceiling height was robust.
Perhaps even stronger evidence for the desirability of higher ceilings is provided by the willingness of buyers to purchase real estate with higher ceilings, despite higher costs involved in its manufacture and maintenance (e.g., heating). For example, although 9-foot ceilings have become increasingly common, the extra cost of adding this single foot to the height of a ceiling is estimated to be about $20,000 for a 4000-square-foot house in the US (Handley, 2011). Indeed, the data from the marketplace show that some people prefer and are willing to pay more for living spaces with taller than standard ceilings, despite increased cost.
Perhaps not surprisingly, attention to ceiling height is not a new phenomenon in architectural design. Considered by many to be the most influential person in the history of architecture, the renaissance architect Palladio (1570/1965) devoted significant portions of his major treatise entitled “I quattro libri dell'architettura” (The four books of architecture) to rules governing ceiling height. Influenced by the notion of harmony, he listed a series of mathematical proportions and ratios that represented ideal relations among the width, length, and height of rooms. In essence, within Palladio's framework, preference for architectural spaces is a function of perceived proportion.
Aside from ceiling height, there is also reason to believe that another factor, perceived enclosure, might have an impact on beauty judgments of spaces. Perceived enclosure can be viewed as the perceived degree of movement through space (see Stamps, 2005, Stamps, 2010, Stamps and Krishnan, 2004). Stamps (2005) argued that the degree of movement through space is more accurately described as permeability, which in turn has visual and locomotive variants. For the purpose of the present study we defined perceived enclosure as the degree of perceived visual and locomotive permeability. Stamps, 2005, Stamps, 2010 further argued that range of vision has a direct bearing on survival, by enabling the organism to see, hide, and identify threats. Within this evolutionary framework, preference for architectural space is a function of the extent to which it facilitates permeability.1
Stamps, 2005, Stamps, 2010 ideas were influenced by Appleton's (1975) habitat and prospect-refuge theories, initially postulated in relation to landscapes but since extended to the built environment. According to habitat theory, the judgment of an environment as aesthetically pleasing is a function of its inclusion of features (e.g., shapes, colors, spatial arrangements) indicating its favourability to survival, regardless of whether or not those features are accurate reflectors of greater survivability. In turn, he defined prospect as “unimpeded opportunity to see” and refuge as “an opportunity to hide” (p. 66), and argued that they constitute intermediate steps in aesthetic appreciation of environments because they affect our perceptions of survivability:
Habitat theory postulates that aesthetic pleasure in landscape derives from the observer experiencing an environment favourable to the satisfaction of his biological needs. Prospect-refuge theory postulates that, because the ability to see without being seen is an intermediate step in the satisfaction of many of those needs, the capacity of an environment to ensure the achievement of this becomes a more immediate source of aesthetic satisfaction.
Appleton, 1975, p. 66.
For our purposes here, two points are worth emphasizing. First, to Appleton (1975) the ability to ‘see without being seen’2 can lead to aesthetic pleasure. Because prospect (i.e., seeing) and refuge (i.e., not being seen) are by definition the two components of this ability, their realization should contribute positively to aesthetic pleasure. This idea is also captured by Stamps, 2005, Stamps, 2010 concept of permeability, such that greater permeability should lead to greater aesthetic pleasure for a given environment. Second, this is not to say that the contributions of prospect and refuge to aesthetic pleasure are context invariant. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that context is an important factor in all manner of judgment and decision making (Goldstein & Weber, 1997), including aesthetics (Brieber, Nadal, Leder, & Rosenberg, 2014). One would therefore expect it to influence the extent to which prospect and refuge contribute to aesthetic pleasure within built environments as well.
To gain further insight into whether ceiling height and perceived enclosure are important variables in architectural design, we conducted an informal survey of 25 interior designers (23 females) during the annual general meeting of the Ontario Interior Designers held in Toronto, ON (March, 2013). The average age of the sample was 50 years (SD = 8.06), and all held university or post-graduate degrees. We asked this sample to rate the extent to which ceiling height and openness influence their own design process (0 = not at all, 5 = extremely). Their average ratings suggested that both ceiling height (M = 3.56, SD = .92) (t[24] = 5.78, p < .001, d = 1.16) and openness (M = 3.42, SD = .93) (t[23] = 4.84, p < .001, d = .97) influence the design process considerably (i.e., compared to the midpoint = 2.5). This suggests that interior designers are aware of the importance of these two factors in the design process.
Our focus thus far has been on the effects of ceiling height and perceived enclosure on aesthetic assessment of spaces. However, we were also interested in examining the effects of ceiling height and perceived enclosure on decisions to enter or exit those spaces (i.e., approach-avoidance decisions). We were interested in this issue because there are previous data to suggest that people are more likely to opt to be in spaces that they also find beautiful. For example, Ritterfeld and Cupchik (1996) demonstrated that the beauty ratings assigned to photographs of interior spaces are the strongest determinants of the willingness to live in those spaces. Extended to the present study, one would expect that participants would be more likely to opt to approach spaces that they also find more beautiful, because factors that affect beauty judgments (beautiful vs. not beautiful) will affect approach-avoidance decisions (enter vs. exit) in similar ways. However, in the neuroscience of reward there is a well-established distinction in the brain systems responsible for liking versus wanting (Berridge, 1995). This neurological distinction would seem to suggest that the neural basis for judging a given space as beautiful (i.e., liking) might not necessarily correspond with the neural basis for a decision to approach it (i.e., wanting), and that this might manifest itself in different and potentially contradictory responses (e.g., opting not to approach a space that one finds beautiful). Thus, although previous research has shown that one might expect to see a close relation between beauty judgment and approach-avoidance in the context of architectural design (Ritterfeld & Cupchik, 1996), there is also reason to believe that a neural dissociation between liking and wanting (Berridge, 1995) might lead to a differentiation of how ceiling height and perceived enclosure affect beauty judgments and approach-avoidance decisions (see Vartanian et al., 2013).
Based on the theoretical and empirical background as well as our own survey of interior designers, the present study was designed with the aim of assessing the effects of ceiling height and perceived enclosure on aesthetic judgments and approach-avoidance decisions in the context of architectural interiors. We had four hypotheses regarding the behavioral effects of ceiling height and perceived enclosure. First, we hypothesized that people prefer rooms with high ceilings. Thus, participants would be more likely to judge rooms with higher ceilings as beautiful than rooms with lower ceilings. Confirmation of this hypothesis would constitute a straightforward replication of Baird et al.'s (1978) claim. Second, we hypothesized that people find open rooms beautiful. This hypothesis is based on the idea that open rooms afford a greater degree of perceived visual and locomotive permeability (Stamps, 2005, Stamps, 2010). Third, we hypothesized that rooms with higher ceilings are more approachable than rooms with lower ceilings. Fourth, we hypothesized that people are more likely to enter open rooms than enclosed rooms. Our third and fourth hypotheses were motivated by the idea that there might exist a functional association between aesthetics and behavior such that factors that affect beauty judgments (beautiful vs. not beautiful) will affect approach-avoidance decisions (enter vs. exit) in similar ways. In this sense, we are likely to enter rooms that we also find beautiful.
Additionally, we aimed to explore the mechanisms underlying the potential behavioral effects in terms of their neural correlates by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).3 The advantage of collecting fMRI data is that they enable one to localize regions of the brain where brain activity is modulated in response to manipulations of independent variables—in this case ceiling height and perceived enclosure. In turn, the quality of the inferences one draws from the observation of these activations is proportional to the functional specificity associated with the region under consideration (see Bub, 2000, Poldrack, 2006). Functional specificity (i.e., selectivity) refers to the ability to infer a specific function (e.g., memory) based on the activation of a specific brain region or structure (Vartanian & Mandel, 2011). Ideally, manipulations of the independent variable result in activations in brain regions with high degrees of functional specificity. In such cases, brain activations can aid in inferring mental processes and/or neural mechanisms accompanying the observed behavioral effects.
Our hypotheses about the brain regions underlying the effect of ceiling height were based on the idea that the observation of proportion and ratio in architectural design likely necessitates visuospatial exploration, navigation, and attention. Thus, we reasoned that variations in ceiling height modulates brain networks for visuospatial processing, localized in medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures (Aguirre et al., 1996, Burgess, 2008, Spiers et al., 2001), or the frontal and parietal cortices in the dorsal stream which are connected by axonal tracts that run along the dorsolateral regions of the brain (Mishkin et al., 1983, Ungerleider and Mishkin, 1982; see also Kravitz, Saleem, Baker, & Mishkin, 2011). In other words, we reasoned that rooms with higher ceilings might be preferred because they facilitate greater levels of visuospatial exploration and attention, in the process activating parts of the MTL and/or the dorsal stream. In addition, rooms with higher ceilings might also be preferred by affecting the feelings of the viewers, related to changes in the activity of brain regions that underlie the experience of affect, emotion, pleasure and reward (see Barrett et al., 2007, Barrett and Wager, 2006, Berridge and Kringelbach, 2009, Chatterjee and Vartanian, 2014, Kringelbach, 2005).
Where in the brain would one expect to observe responsiveness as a function of variation in perceived enclosure? There are a number of different candidate structures. For example, the parahippocampal place area (PPA) responds selectively to places (i.e., spatial enclosures) (Epstein & Kanwisher, 1998). Not only is the PPA involved in scene perception, but its activity while viewing scenes is modulated by level of pleasure (Biederman and Vessel, 2006, Yue et al., 2007). This suggests that the PPA might be sensitive to variation in perceived enclosure in the context of beauty judgment of spaces. Second, previous research has shown that the degree of physical openness depicted in scenes is strongly correlated with ratings of beauty, pleasure, and interestingness (Franz, von der Heyde, & Bülthoff, 2005; see also Kaplan, Kaplan, & Ryan, 1998), suggesting that regions of the brain that underlie the experience of affect, emotion, pleasure and reward might be responsive to openness—the reverse of perceived enclosure (see Barrett et al., 2007, Barrett and Wager, 2006, Berridge and Kringelbach, 2009, Chatterjee and Vartanian, 2014, Kringelbach, 2005). Third, it is also possible that much like high ceilings, open spaces facilitate visuospatial exploration, in the process activating parietal and frontal regions in the dorsal stream (Mishkin et al., 1983, Ungerleider and Mishkin, 1982; see also Kravitz et al., 2011). In fact, to the extent that this exploration is coupled with an intention to approach (or avoid) a space, it would also be accompanied by activation in brain regions implicated in motor imagery and/or planning of voluntary motor movement (Crammond, 1997, Decety, 1996, Deiber et al., 1998, Grush, 2004, Hanakawa et al., 2008).
We tested our hypotheses by reanalyzing data from a previously published fMRI dataset (Vartanian et al., 2013), conducted originally to investigate the impact of contour (curvilinear vs. rectilinear) on beauty judgments and approach-avoidance decisions. Specifically, in the beauty judgment condition our participants were instructed to indicate whether the space they were exposed to was “beautiful” or “not beautiful” by pressing one of two buttons, whereas in the approach-avoidance condition they were instructed to opt to “enter” or “exit” the space by pressing one of two buttons. Our focus on contour in the original analyses was motivated by a strong body of empirical evidence extending back to the 1920s showing that people prefer curvilinear contour to rectilinear contour in design (Silvia & Barona, 2009). Indeed, we replicated and extended this effect to architectural design in our study, showing that people are more likely to judge curvilinear than rectilinear spaces as beautiful. However, curvilinear spaces were no more likely to elicit approach decisions than rectilinear spaces. In conjunction with a complementary neural dissociation observed between these two processes, we concluded that beauty judgment and approach-avoidance decisions might be underwritten by different sets of considerations and computations.
However, within each level of contour our stimuli were also balanced in terms of ceiling height and perceived enclosure (Fig. 1). For the present report, we shifted the focus from contour to ceiling height and perceived enclosure, enabling us to parse the data anew in order to test the aforementioned four hypotheses, as well as isolating their neural correlates to explore the possible contributions of various mechanisms and processes to the observed effects. It is important to note that unlike the rich empirical and theoretical bases that link curvilinear contour to aesthetic preference (Silvia & Barona, 2009), the evidential base linking ceiling height and perceived enclosure to preference is relatively sparse. As such, our examination of the impact of these two variables on brain and behavior must be considered exploratory rather than confirmatory. Nevertheless, we hope that in conjunction with evidence from other related studies (e.g., Fich et al., 2014), the data generated in the present study will contribute to the development and refinement of theoretical models of how these two factors influence behavior and related physiological function (see Churchland & Sejnowski, 1992).
Section snippets
Participants
We recruited 18 (12 females, 6 males) neurologically healthy participants (M = 23.39 years, SD = 4.49) with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. All participants were right handed, as determined by a standard questionnaire (M = 74.72, SD = 19.29) (Oldfield, 1971).
Materials
The stimuli for this study consisted of 200 photographs of architectural spaces (Fig. 1). Half of the photographs were used in the beauty judgment run and the other half for the approach-avoidance run. The stimuli were culled from
Behavioral
We analyzed the effects of ceiling height and perceived enclosure, separately on beauty judgments and approach-avoidance decisions. We tested non-directional hypotheses, except when testing for the effect of ceiling height on beauty judgments because of prior data (see Baird et al., 1978). A Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test demonstrated that ceiling height had a significant effect on beauty judgments, Z = −1.76, p = .039, r(Z/√N) = .41. Specifically, participants were more likely to judge spaces as
Discussion
The present study was conducted to explore the effects of ceiling height and perceived enclosure on beauty judgments and approach-avoidance decisions in the context of architecture. As predicted, participants were more likely to judge as beautiful spaces with higher than lower ceilings. In contrast, ceiling height had no effect on approach-avoidance decisions. These findings confirm previous results on the impact of ceiling height on preference for rooms (Baird et al., 1978), and extend them by
Conclusion
The evidence presented here contributes to a body of empirical knowledge suggesting that our evaluation of architectural spaces is influenced by variations in their physical features, and that these effects involve specific and dissociable structures in the brain. Specifically, it appears that our aesthetic preference for rooms with higher ceilings is coupled with activation in parietal and frontal structures located in the dorsal stream that support visuospatial exploration and attention,
Conflict of interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
This work was kindly supported by the following two grants under the direction of Jose Luis Gonzalez-Mora: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (TIN2011-28146, 2011) and Ministerio de Industria, Turismo y Comercio, Avanza (TSI-020100-2010-346). We acknowledge the support of Servicio de Resonancia Magnética para Investigaciones Biomédicas de la ULL. We also thank the interior designers for completing our survey at the annual general meeting of the Ontario Interior Designers held in Toronto, ON
References (59)
- et al.
Neuroaesthetics
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
(2014) Motor imagery: Never in your wildest dream
Trends in Neurosciences
(1997)The neurophysiological basis of motor imagery
Behavioral and Brain Research
(1996)- et al.
Cerebral processes related to visuomotor imagery and generation of simple finger movements studied with positron emission tomography
Neuroimage
(1998) - et al.
Can architectural design alter the physiological reaction to psychosocial stress? A virtual TSST experiment
Physiology & Behavior
(2014) - et al.
An empirical approach to the experience of architectural space in virtual reality—exploring relations between features and affective appraisals of rectangular indoor spaces
Automation in Construction
(2005) - et al.
Object vision and spatial vision
Trends in Neurosciences
(1983) The assessment and analysis of handedness: The Edinburgh inventory
Neuropsychologia
(1971)Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data?
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
(2006)- et al.
Perceptions of interiors of spaces
Journal of Environmental Psychology
(1996)