| his project was designed to extend the principles of natural categorization to the classification of landscapes for visual quality assessment. In the first study, 20 lay people named and outlined distinct geographic units on USGS topographic maps. Six of the units identified were selected for further study on the basis of ratings of overall environmental quality, familiarity, and naturalness. Consensual names and boundaries of the units were determined. In the second study, the same 20 subjects rated 15 scenes from each of the 6 units for representativeness (typicality) and visual quality. The ratings of representativeness and visual quality were highly reliable, with coefficients ranging from.98 to.84. The correlations between representativeness and visual quality were variable. The correlations were positive for the two high environmental quality units (r =.78 and r =.83, p... |
