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The Influence of Built Environments on People’s Space Preferences and Attention Distribution Across Studying, Socializing, and Relaxing Activities

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Yujie Zhao¹ (), Mae. R. Pacificar¹, Hiba Farooqui¹, Dana A. Hayward^1,2,3; ¹Psychology Department, University of Alberta, ²Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute, ³Women and Children's Health Research Institute

People interact with built environments daily, however less is known about how environments impact people’s choice of spaces for different activities, and what environmental features people attend to or use in the decision-making process. To fill this gap, we recorded undergraduate participants’ gaze to index their attention during goal-directed free viewing of 15 real campus photographs using webcam-based eye tracking. For each picture, participants rated how much they would use the location for (i) studying, (ii) socializing, and (iii) meditating, relaxing, or praying (MRP) consecutively. We defined areas of interest (AOIs) for seating, nature, access (entrances or exits), light sources, windows, amenities, and other distinctive unclassified features (i.e. sculptures). Participants’ personality traits were evaluated through questionnaires. We first investigated whether people’s environmental ratings and feature preferences differed across activities; we found that, overall people rated all spaces more favourably for socializing than the other activities, preferred indoor spaces for studying and outdoor ones for socializing and MRP, and showed personality-based differences, such as people who find it hard to switch their attention favor indoor settings. In addition, we investigated whether attention allocation differed during activity-directed environmental viewing by looking at their gaze pattern. We hypothesize that people would direct more attention (reflected as longer and more frequent fixations) to goal-relevant AOIs, and that personality traits would further modulate gaze patterns. Taken together, this study provides evidence that environmental features do affect the activities people would like to undertake, and that our personality traits also play a role.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Spatial