Abstract
When individuals encounter an environment, they psychologically perceive and process physical characteristics, especially forms and structures, of the environment and infer meanings of the environment, such as, condition, role, status, and function of the environment, that hide behind its facial characteristics. The process of inferring the visually hidden meanings is named 'environmental inference'. The present study aimed to examine environmental inference to distinguish between Japanese and English private garden scenes by adopting the frame of Brunswik's lens model approach. Participants consisted of 44 university students, and stimuli included 34 private garden pictures, 17 Japanese and 17 English ones. The participants were presented the pictures one by one in random order and asked to rate them on 17 rating scales. Then, they were given all picture set and asked to distinguish between Japanese gardens and English gardens. Results showed that 1) Japanese and English gardens differed in perceptual/physical, affective and cognitive characteristics; 2) distinguished gardens also had differences in the almost same characteristics revealed above; then 3) participants inferred the nationality of the gardens in more than 80 percent accuracy. Finally, limitations of the present study and potential future studies were discussed.
