A STUDY OF THE PERCEPTION OF OCCUPIED AREA IN THE PUBLIC SPACE

Abstract

Public behavior is affected by perceotion of other peoples' personal space. This study investigated the influence on this perception of the other person's varied positional relationship with wall and column subspace establishing elements. Full-size experiments demonstrated that there is a perceived occupied space around a person, depending on the position of that person in relationship to a wall or column, and that the boundary of this space is rarely crossed. A second experiment with a scale model of the same previous spatial arrangements was conducted, as a means of discovering the extent of these perceived personal spaces, by the subjects' use of such words as "aside", "between", and "inside". Thus the areas expressed by these words were used to predict the boundary of space that the subjects rarely go into, i.e., the perceived occupied area.