# Using Eye Tracking to Reveal Responses to the Built Environment and Its Constituents
## 4 Discussion  
The study of visual perception of the built environment is a field that remains relatively nascent, but has seen an increasing amount of interest in recent years [28; 29; 30]. Here, we have used eye-tracking to investigate particular features of buildings and other structures in paired images. The results from the 7 studies analyzed in the present work fall into 5 categories of image pairs: traditional vs. modern buildings, rich vs. poor texture, presence or absence of fenestration, presence of eyes and face-like features, and natural vs. artificial environment images. The main point of these studies was to approach the \"traditional vs. modern\"  
Figure 24: Cumulative results for comparisons between all pairs of images with Nature-Like Geometry and Non-Nature-Like Geometry (see text). Three asterisks indicate \(p\) < 0.001 in Student’s \(t\)-test. question but that, in itself, leads to all the rest: pre-modern architecture is associated with more textured surfaces, either because of the presence of decoration, or because of the materials used; fenestration as a distinct pattern of openings (as opposed to curtain walls, for example) is also more associated with traditional architecture, and its arrangement is sometimes reminiscent of the basic arrangement of a human face, with two eyes and a mouth. Hence, these categories were used to examine these particular features either on buildings or on other objects. Given our understanding that the geometry of pre-modern architecture is, in broad terms, the geometry found in nature [18; 19; 20; 21; 22] a final category, natural vs. artificial environments, was introduced. The subject of this category is vast, and in no way were the few images tested here meant to explore it in any satisfactory degree; rather, the aim was to test whether the results from this category would be in the same direction as the others. These seven studies were formulated to test our hypothesis that the human gaze would fixate first on images of buildings with features of organized complexity, natural scenes, and face-like features/fenestration and dwell on these images for longer. The findings support our hypothesis in various degrees, especially regarding the dwell time. The human unconscious seems to direct our experience of the built environment more than most realize. The first category, _modern_ vs. _traditional_, showed a clear bias for the complex detail found in traditional architecture over the repetitive facades of modern buildings. Fractal patterns on traditional facades commanded the first fixation in most image pairs, suggesting that the organized complexity offered an attractive landing spot for the 60 participants. The data suggests that complexity informs the brain of stimuli worth examining more closely, that there is more information to be found, hence producing longer dwell times, with an average difference having a p\(<\)0.01 in Student's \(t\)-test. All the images in Study 1 (which are the majority of the images in this category) come from the 2020 Harris Poll [25], where Americans' conscious preference for traditional buildings was demonstrated. Because of this prior study, we now have a combination of questionnaire and biometric data, acquired independently by different researchers in different population samples, all pointing in the same direction: traditional facades are, in most cases, the first to draw the gaze, the ones where gazes dwells upon for longer, and are better liked. In the additional images, a Persian Palace in Tehran was a stronger attractor for the participants' gaze than a modern facade, in images where they were both \"transplanted\" in the natural surroundings of South Tyrol, in Study 6. The choice of using a non-local traditional architecture was deliberate, to avoid any association of a traditional Tyrolean building with its environment. The preferential scoring of the non-local traditional building reinforces the scoring of the same pair in a preference questionnaire study [27], so again we have a case of converging data.