Psychological Cognitive Factors Affecting Visual Behavior and Satisfaction Preference for Forest Recreation Space

Background: People are paying increasing attention to urban forest landscapes, and recreational landscape spaces (providing recreation and viewing functions) are an important part of the urban forest landscape. Visual tracking technology is a flexible and accurate modern research method. When this technology is applied to forest landscape evaluation, it can assist in explaining the content that could not be studied in depth in the past and has high application value. However, although an eye tracker can tell us what the user is looking at, it cannot tell us why they are looking at it or how they feel after seeing it. To this end, we combined a 7-point spatial cognition questionnaire and satisfaction preference to understand the visual behavior (fixation point time, number of fixation points, etc.) and preference satisfactions of users in recreational landscape spaces to help designers understand what elements attract people’s visual attention and improve the design of these spaces. Methods: We used eye-tracking and cognitive questionnaires to obtain experimental data and used factor analysis and linear regression analysis of SPPS 23.0 to analyze data. Main purpose: Clarify the factors affecting people’s visual behavior and satisfaction preferences in forest recreation spaces to provide theoretical guidance for planning and designing forest landscapes. Main results: (1) Places with more frequent eye movements have relatively lower satisfaction preferences; (2) The spatial perception factors affect participants’ visual behavior, and satisfaction preference is different based on many indicators (WCB, WSO, WSN, SSH, etc.) in forest recreation space; (3) The professional background education affects the participants’ visual-behavior evaluation of the recreational landscape space and also affects the participants’ focus on the landscape preference. When the spatial type of forest recreation space changes, the spatial perception factors that affect the participants’ visual behavior and satisfaction preferences also change. Based on the above, we suggest that in forest recreation space, the spatial perception indicators should be improved according to the characteristics of space itself, then improve the satisfaction preferences for the scene in a targeted manner to make participants produce effective and positive visual behavior. Meanwhile, for a well-built forest park, we should provide the landscape node with the best visual effect and satisfaction preference for tourists from different professional backgrounds on the park’s tour route map based on the characteristics of the forest recreational landscape space.