Visual impression is the first impact on human perception through receiving and assessing the external information observed by the eyes. Therefore, product appearance is closely linked to the human’s visual experience and can affect human’s mood throughout the process of information perception and product manipulation. Generally, visual ability declines as age increases, which can lead to visual impairment and unpleasant moods among the elderly. For the elderly, there is a need to improve the quality of the visual experience in design. The aim of this research is to explore feasible methods to discover the consistency between subjective desires and objective environmental reactions in order to provide the optimal pleasurable visual experience conditions for elderly individuals in design. The objectives are 1) To examine the common elderly visual experience features in relation to physiological and psychological effects, specifically reflected in vision, perception, and emotion; 2) To determine a positive visual experience framework for elderly-focused design based on visual experience consideration; 3) To develop positive visual experience assessments and test methods specially designed for the elderly in order to gather information and data about subjective desire and objective reaction to objects; 4) To analyze the results of consistency between subjective preference and objective attraction in order to form a positive visual experience for elderly individuals. This research describes the research process and its findings. Initially, the introduction of the thesis presents the research motivations and background, with its aim and objectives defined. Related literature supporting the research is then examined for further understanding of aging, visual experience and relevant emotional issues, and research methodologies. Based on this understanding of the elderly visual experience and visual experience behavior, along with observations of purchasing processes, interviews with the elderly, and interviews with experts, a set of assessment tools (VPTs) was developed for assessing the elderly visual experience factors from the two perspectives of subjective preference and objective attraction. Based on statistical analysis, the elderly general cognitive features, and a series of positive visual experience factors that affect the emotional mood of the elderly were determined. The results of the investigation contribute to design for the elderly with positive visual experience factors identified for enhancing the elderly satisfaction in their visual experiences and manipulating product design to create a positive emotional state. This VPTs assessment tool can also be recommended as a reference for investigating into other various target groups’ visual experience features.

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The process of preference formation is influenced by many factors. These include intrinsic stimulus attributes as well as contextual factors, which are not directly related with the stimulus itself. In this PhD thesis I present seven studies that give significant new insights about how human preference is affected by intrinsic stimulus properties, as well as contextual factors. The common denominator is the use of abstract shapes forming regular patterns (reflectional symmetry). The presence of symmetry within the stimuli predicts preference, and there is behavioural evidence of an association between symmetry and positive valence. The first study shows the neural basis of this association (Part 1, Chapter 2). The thesis proceeds with four studies (Part 2, Chapters 3 – 6) exploring the role of (exogenous) attention on preference evaluation of abstract shapes that already contain intrinsic valence (symmetry/random). Previous research has demonstrated that attention plays a major role on preference formation. These studies showed that exogenous orienting of attention led to more positive evaluation of stimuli at cued locations, although this effect was sensitive to endogenous control. In the last part (Part 3), Chapter 7 explored preference devaluation of abstract symmetry with increasing visual eccentricity, as a potential consequence of reduced perceived regularity at farther locations. Random shapes, which do not lend themselves to coherent interpretation at fovea, were similarly evaluated at all eccentricities. Chapter 8 did not focus on preference. With a novel design, it explored how symmetry detection speed in the periphery was affected by the way attention was deployed in visual space. Overall these findings confirm the role of symmetry in aesthetic appreciation of abstract shapes. Importantly, they highlight a role of attention orienting and gazing in preference modulation. Defining what factors determine preference is key to understanding human behaviour and decisions. This thesis provides a significant contribution towards this goal.

The human visual system is sensitive to differences in gloss and translucence, two optical properties which are found in conjunction in many natural materials. They are driven by similar underlying physical properties of light transport - the degree to which light is scattered from the surface of a material, or within the material. This thesis aimed to address some fundamental questions about how gloss and translucence are perceived. Two psychophysical methods (maximum likelihood difference scaling, and conjoint measurement) were used throughout, as they provided an appropriate way of investigating how perceptual experiences related to physical variables. In the introduction, I review the literature on the perception of gloss and translucence. Study 1 investigated the relationship between variables controlling light transport in translucent volumes and percepts of translucence. The results show that translucence perception is not based on estimates of light transport properties per se, but probably uses spatially-related statistical pseudocues in conjunction with other cues. Study 2 examined a similar issue, but the translucent material was presented as a layer enveloping a solid object. Behavioural responses were similar for these translucent materials, which were perceived as glossy layers of coating. Study 3 further explored established findings that perceived translucence shows inconstancy under changes in viewing condition. Perceived translucence was dependent in a complex way on both light-scattering in the material and illumination direction in both volumes and layers of translucent materials. Study 4 used similar layers of subsurface light-scattering and -absorbing material and applied them to multiple base materials. Opacity and a lack of mirror-like reflections enabled observers to make the most accurate independent judgements of darkness and cloudiness. Study 5 explored observers' sensitivity to spatial variation of scatter across a surface using similar layers of coating, and the way in which observers might weight cues differently to answer subtly different questions (judgements of 'shininess' vs. 'cleanliness'). Layer thickness and variation of scatter significantly affected perceived shine and cleanliness, with layer thickness influencing decisions more than variation. Scatter variation contributed to decisions significantly more for judgements of cleanliness than shine. Study 6 investigated how tactile surface roughness influenced perceived gloss. Previous findings have shown that tactile compliance and friction influence perceived gloss, and that friction interacts with visual gloss. Our results showed that surface roughness and visual gloss both affected perceived gloss, but there was no interaction, suggesting that different types of haptic information are combined with visual information differently. Finally, study 7 explored the potential cortical basis of perceived translucence. Through testing a neuropsychological patient, we showed that perceived translucence is dependent on cortical areas not responsible for colour or texture discrimination. The thesis concludes with a discussion of additional recent findings, the implications of the research reported in this thesis, and proposals for future research.

When an observer views a complex visual scene and tries to identify an object, his or her visual system must decide what regions of the visual field correspond to the object of interest and which do not. One aspect of this process involves the grouping of the local contrast information (e.g., orientation, position and frequency) into a smooth contour object. This thesis investigated whether the presence of other flanking objects affected this contour integration of a central target contour. To test this, a set of Gaborized contour shapes were embedded in a randomised Gabor noise field. The detectability of the contours was altered by adjusting the alignment of the Gabor patches in the contour (orientation jitter) until a participant was unable to distinguish between a field with and without a target shape (2-AFC procedure). By varying the magnitude of this jitter, detection thresholds were determined for target contours under various experimental conditions. These thresholds were used to investigate whether contour integration was sensitive to shared shape information between objects across the visual field. This thesis determined that the presence of flanking contours of a similar shape (as the target) facilitated the detection of a noisy target contour. The specific results suggest that this facilitation does not involve a simple template matching or shape priming but is associated with integration of shape level information in the detection of the most likely smooth closed contour. The magnitude of this flanker facilitation effect was sensitive to a number of factors (e.g., numerosity, relative position of the flankers, and perimeter complexity/compactness). The implication of these findings is that the processing of highly localised contrast and orientation information originating from a single object is subject to modulation from other sources of shape information across the whole of the visual field.

The present thesis is broadly concerned with the processing of structural information. More specifically, it investigates the possibility that auditory pitch patterns share, at some level, supramodal structural representations and processes with visuo-spatial patterns. The motivation for the research was provided by a number of areas of psychological research that are brought together and discussed in this thesis, and which inform the development of a new theoretical framework that conceives of a supramodal pattern space (SPS). According to the SPS framework, auditory and visual patterns can be represented in equivalent ‘1!-D’ supramodal pattern spaces. A series of experiments was devised to test the assumptions of the SPS framework, by means of analysing the perception of two types of structural transformation: inverse and retrograde. The main hypothesis that was tested in all experiments predicted a processing advantage for inverse transformations when patterns corresponded to 1!-D supramodal pattern space. Support for the hypothesis was provided by experiments adopting a short-term recognition paradigm. However, contrasting results were revealed by experiments adopting a structural priming paradigm, which did not support the hypothesis. It was concluded that different processing strategies were used depending on the task demands. The findings were discussed with relation to theories of sequential pattern learning, melodic perception and brain organisation.

How faces are recognized and detected has been the focus of an extensive corpus of research. As such, it is now well established that human faces can be detected rapidly in a visual scene and that they automatically capture a viewer’s attention over other objects. However, under natural viewing conditions the human face is attached to a substantial cue, the human body. The evidence to-date of a similar attentional processing advantage for human bodies is less clear. This is remarkable given the social significance and evidence of neural specificity for these stimuli. Additionally, most previous investigations of preferential attention towards faces and bodies have presented these stimuli in simple displays, namely uniform colour backgrounds (Bindemann, Scheepers, Ferguson & Burton, 2010). Therefore, this thesis aimed to address the relationship between attention and face and body processing in natural scenes directly by assessing the consequences of numerous experimental manipulations in both a visual search paradigm and additional singleton paradigm. The first line of enquiry examined participants’ ability to detect face and body stimuli in comparison to other objects in natural scenes. Subsequent experiments examined whether faces and bodies captured attention when they were task-irrelevant. In line with previous research, the main findings indicate that human faces do have attentional advantages and capture attention in both natural and grey scenes. They also indicate that human bodies (without the head) do not have detection advantages over other objects, nor do they capture attention in a bottom-up manner. Any biases or detection advantages observed for body targets are because they larger in size than other objects or because they are odd stimuli in that scene. Human full-body targets (including the face), which are perceived on a day-to-day basis, capture attention partly because they include face and partly because they are large objects in the scene. These findings modify claims of person perception suggesting that the detection of a full-body in natural scenes is facilitated by attention capture by faces, any advantages from bodies are the result of attention capture by their large size, rather than some attentional advantage. Future investigating into face and body processing should use natural backgrounds to gain a more realistic insight in to face and body processing in the real world.

Faces are probably one of the most important objects that we encounter in that they convey multi-layered and intertwined information such as identity, intentionality and emotional expression. Thus, it is not surprising that understanding a face has been the focus of intense multi-disciplinary research over the last decades. An influential framework for face processing was suggested by Bruce and Young (1986). Based on this model I tested three hypotheses: the first relates to the hierarchical structure of face processing the second relates to the nature of early face processing and the third relates to a possible early route for expression processing. The hierarchical nature of identity processing was tested using fMRI and behavioural experiments. These studies suggested three stages for face identity processing: the first involves representation of physical properties of a face in posterior occipital cortices the second reflects categorical representation of identity in fusiform gyrus the third represents facial identity processing that depends on familiarity with a face and involves anterior temporal polar cortices. Focusing on the first stage of the hierarchical processing of a face, I suggest that in early identity processing different types of information from of a face are processed separately. Two dissociations are observed in posterior occipital cortices, the first between processing different bands of spatial frequency information and the second between processing feature and configural information. In addition, I demonstrated that featural information is important for individuating faces and sensitivity to configural information is predictive of general face recognition skill. Evidence for early processing of expression information that is mediated via amygdala is demonstrated in a patient study. Patients and healthy controls with intact amygdalae differed from patients with amygdale lesions in an early ERP and fMRI responses to fearful expressions.

We often use language to refer to items within our immediate proximity whereby the constraints of the visual context serves to restrict the number of possible referents, making it easier to anticipate which item will most likely be referred to next. However, we also use language to refer to past, future, or even imagined events. In such cases, anticipation is no longer restricted by the visual context and may now be influenced by real-world knowledge. In a set of eye-tracking experiments we explored the mapping of language onto internal representations of visually available scenes, as well as previously viewed scenes. Firstly, we were interested in how event-plausibility is able to influence our internal representations of described events and secondly, how these representations might be modulated by the nature of the visual context (as present or absent). Our findings showed that when describing events in the context of a concurrent scene the eye movement patterns during the unfolding language indicated that participants anticipated both plausible and implausible items. However, when the visual scene was removed immediately before the onset of spoken language participants anticipated plausible items, but not implausible items – only by providing a more constraining linguistic context did we find anticipatory looks to the implausible items. This suggests that in the absence of a visual context we require a more constraining linguistic context to achieve the same degree of constraint provided by a concurrent visual scene. We conclude that the conceptual representations activated during language processing in a concurrent visual context are quantitatively different from those activated when the visual context to which that language applies is absent.

Current guidelines for pedestrian road lighting are not based on empirical evidence. One approach to providing suitable evidence is to examine the effect of lighting on the visual tasks of pedestrians. This first requires an understanding of what these visual tasks are. An eye-tracking study was carried out in which pedestrians walked a real, outdoor route during the day and after-dark. A novel dual-task method was used to identify the critical visual tasks of the pedestrians. Reaction times to a concurrent audio response task were used to indicate instances when attention may have been diverted towards something significant in the visual environment. Analysis of the eye-tracking videos at these critical times found that the path and other people were the two most significant items looked at. Observation of the path is important for detection and avoidance of obstacles and trip hazards. Good road lighting should therefore facilitate obstacle detection. An obstacle detection experiment was therefore carried out examining the effect of illuminance and Scotopic/Photopic (S/P) ratio on obstacle detection. The experiment improved the realism and ecological validity of previous research by introducing a dynamic fixation target, realistic apparatus scales and real walking (on a treadmill) whilst carrying out an obstacle detection task. Results showed that obstacle detection only improved with illuminance increases up to 2.0 lux. A higher S/P ratio (2.0) provided better detection performance than a low S/P ratio (1.2), but only at the lowest illuminance used of 0.2 lux. The data is used to discuss optimal design criteria for pedestrian road lighting based on obstacle detection. However, other purposes of road lighting, such as creating a feeling of reassurance and enabling accurate interpersonal judgements to be carried out, should also be considered when designing pedestrian road lighting.