Senses, as part of our comprehension about life and environment, have always influenced our emotions, actions, choices, memories, awareness, perceptions and preferences (Andermane, Bosten, Seth, & Ward, 2020; Krishna & Elder, 2010; Penning-Rowsell, 1982). Our surrounding is experienced through several senses which provides us with a sense of knowledge about a particular space (Chen, Adimo, & Bao, 2009). For example, regarding aesthetic perception, it was reported that multi-sensory stimuli and integration of all the senses (vision, olfactory, auditory and tactile) can give information for evaluating aesthetic quality (Etzi, Spence, & Gallace, 2014; Uzzell, 1989). On this basis, Lindstrom (2006) indicated that the experiences of multi-sensory can increase the users’ preferences toward a specific product (Lindstrom, 2006).
Visual factors form about 87 percent of our environmental perceptions (Bell, 2013), and there is a huge focus on these factor as our environment has been surrounded by them (Arriaza, Cañas-Ortega, Cañas-Madueño, & Ruiz-Aviles, 2004; Soliva & Hunziker, 2009). Thereby, the conducted researches in the psychology and design field, are mostly related to visual stimuli than others (Akbar, Hale, & Headley, 2003; Twedt, Rainey, & Proffitt, 2019). Although eyesight has been the center of humans’ perception, the other senses also play an important role in the development of our perception.
The multi-sensory shape representation suggested by other researchers, brings in the whole sensory system and affects the spatial configuration (Amedi, Jacobson, Hendler, Malach, & Zohary, 2002). It is assumed that in order to form the properties of amenity and the environment by an observer, the connection between all the events that occurred in the environment, the features of all the involved objects, and all sensory inputs' arrangement is used (Visell et al., 2009). Generally, the senses are not isolated in terms of their usage, and the combination of all senses or some of them work in harmony (Bundy, Lane, & Murray, 2002). The multimodal integration, gives a coherent representation of objects and appoint them meaning in the matter of perceptual experiences through including all senses.
Ulrich (1993) demonstrated that our environmental perception is a multi-sensory rather than being restricted to the visual sense (Ulrich, 1993). As a matter of fact, visual and non-visual stimuli of the landscape are always interconnected in a complex way and require more consideration in all aspects. Ultimately, Cats-Baril and Gibson (1987) described that aesthetic experience and preferences in any particular context can be affected by sensory experience (Cats-Baril & Gibson, 1987). Also it has been stated that content and space dependent functions such as spatial ability and orientation, can cause by different sensory stimuli and their convergence (Carles, Barrio, & de Lucio, 1999).
1.1. Urban Pocket Parks
Interaction with nature is assumed to be one of the vital needs of mankind and benefits of urban green spaces have been studied by many researchers (Mousavi Samimi & Shahhosseini, 2020); physical, mental (Wan, Shen, & Choi, 2020) environmental (Li, Fan, Li, Zhang, & Dong, 2020) and social benefits (Aram, Solgi, & Holden, 2019; Gaikwad & Shinde, 2019), lower perceived stress (Chiang & Li, 2019) and negativity (Schwartz, Dodds, O'Neil‐Dunne, Danforth, & Ricketts, 2019) and promoted well-being (Özgüner & Kendle, 2006; Schnell, Harel, & Mishori, 2019), public health (Van den Berg et al., 2015) and pro-environmental behavior (Martin et al., 2020; Wan & Shen, 2015) are to name but a few. Nowadays, as a result of cities' densification, constructing the small green areas like urban pocket parks (UPP), have got the attention of policy makers' as opposed to the big urban parks (Blake, 2013; Kerishnan, Maruthaveeran, & Maulan, 2020; Lin, Lau, Qin, & Gou, 2017; Nordh & Østby, 2013). One UPP is able to promote the quality of life (El Maghraby, 2019), increase physical (Cohen et al., 2014) and residential property values (Mwende, 2018), improve health (Peschardt, Stigsdotter, & Schipperrijn, 2016) and social interaction (Salih, Ismail, & Mseer, 2020).
The most preferred UPP visual configurations are mystery, coherence, refuge and complexity (H Shahhosseini, Kamal Bin MS, & Bin Maulan, 2015), although, there is still a remaining gap related to multi-sensory content of UPPs (Velarde, Fry, & Tveit, 2007). Auditory, olfactory and tactile have strong impact on humans’ perceptions and preferences (Staal, Pinkney, & Roane, 2003; van der Putten, Vlaskamp, & Schuivens, 2011; Yun, 2006), and should deeply be considered when designing an environment. Through implanting multi-sensory design attributes in the landscape, the fundamental platform can be facilitated for the people of the society to evaluate their expectations of environment. As a matter of fact, based on the gathered information about users' multi-sensory perception and cognitive processing, landscape features can help the users to decide what they prefer.
1.2. Research Objectives
Since the evaluation of landscape aesthetic preferences relies on multiple factors such as emotions, values, cultural aspects, demographic characteristics, multi-sensory perceptions and etc., it is considered to be a complicated task, yet, a comprehensive explanation of the landscape preferences according to these senses is not available. Therefore, evaluating the relationship between non-visual stimuli, which may have an impact on public visual preferences in UPP s, is the main objective of the current study.