Perception Aspects in Underground Spaces using ... - TOI - TU Delft

spatialenvironmenthuman beingmental processesperceptioncognitionemotionmotivationbehaviorFigure 3: Interaction human being/environment/psychological functions (Steffen, 1982, p. 35)Yet what is still missing in the Figure 3 is the society/social context and group perception of thespatial environment. In respect to the research problem, there is a drawback of such an approachsince social context is not considered and the accent is on understanding mental processes ratherthan obtaining a global insight into users perception of underground spaces. For this research, thegoal was to gain more knowledge on group perception of underground stations within a specifiedspatial environment as a part of a given social context. For those reasons, a decision was madenot to study the individual perception of the built environment and related mental processes, butrather to consider a wider scope and study the perception of a group in relation to the builtenvironment in a given social context. In that respect, this research belongs to sociological, ratherthan psychological study.An interesting view on human information processing is provided by Arndt (2001), whodescribes a human being in a most abstract way, as a control loop that adjusts the behavior inaccordance to the stimuli from the environment (Figure 4).sensoric perceptionhuman being'perceiver'action/reactionenvironmentFigure 4: Human being as a control loop, where his role is as a perceiverExtrapolating Figure 4 to this research and taking into account the components from Figure 3,with exclusion of mental processes, a following scheme can be made (Figure 5), explaining theposition of this research. This figure shows clearly that an interest will be taken into group- 23 -