{"id":80,"date":"2004-05-11T16:53:41","date_gmt":"2004-05-11T16:53:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idiolect.truth.posiweb.net\/notes\/?p=80"},"modified":"2004-05-11T16:53:41","modified_gmt":"2004-05-11T16:53:41","slug":"innate-landscape-preferences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/2004\/05\/11\/innate-landscape-preferences\/","title":{"rendered":"Innate Landscape Preferences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Young children (eg age 8) say they prefer savannah landscapes over other types of natural landscape (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.hort.vt.edu\/human\/Abstract%20Links\/ball-falk82.htm\">Balling &#038; Falk, 1982<\/a>). Older children and adults don&#8217;t exhibit this preference. The evolutionary psychology interpretation of this is that there is an innate preference for the environment within which modern humans evolved, but that this preference is over-ridden by lifetime development of aesthetic preferences which are influenced by your personality and environment.<\/p>\n<p>Or, put another way, you&#8217;re born with a feel for the plains of east Africa, but as you get older you can grow to love the flats of Peckham.<\/p>\n<p>In lots of ways this seems like a typical piece of evolutionary psychology. It could be true &#8211; and if it was true it might be interesting &#8211; but there&#8217;s no reason why it has to be true. Has the experiment been replicated? Has it been replicated cross-culturally? Has it been replicated when <a href=\"http:\/\/evolution.anthro.univie.ac.at\/institutes\/urbanethology\/student\/html\/erich\/synekpro.html\">controlling for scene complexity<\/a> and for the adaptive value of the landscape (ie <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shef.ac.uk\/assem\/5\/chamberl.html\">the prospect-refuge affordances<\/a>). The answers to these questions seem to be either &#8216;no&#8217; or &#8216;not alot&#8217; (ie not very well). Obviously i could be wrong and some more delving into the literature might turn up some more references [1].<\/p>\n<p>It also seems to be crying out for a replication with pre-linguistic infants using a preferential-looking paradigm&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>[1] I think my further reading would begin here:<\/p>\n<p>Appleton, J. 1996. The Experience of Landscape. Revised edition. New York, Wiley.<\/p>\n<p>Orians, G.H. &#038; Heerwagen, J.H. 1992. Evolved responses to landscapes. In Barkow, J.H., Cosmides, L. &#038; Tooby, J. (eds) The Adapted Mind. Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 555-579.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ub.rug.nl\/eldoc\/dis\/ppsw\/a.e.van.den.berg\/c2.pdf\">http:\/\/www.ub.rug.nl\/eldoc\/dis\/ppsw\/a.e.van.den.berg\/c2.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Young children (eg age 8) say they prefer savannah landscapes over other types of natural landscape (Balling &#038; Falk, 1982). Older children and adults don&#8217;t exhibit this preference. The evolutionary psychology interpretation of this is that there is an innate preference for the environment within which modern humans evolved, but that this preference is over-ridden [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5KQtW-1i","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}