## 1 Introduction  
Why do we prefer some environments, built and natural, over others? Why do we respond with certain emotions to places, even if we do not have any prior experience with them? Some scholars attributed aesthetic responses to environments solely to learning experiences [1]. Accumulating evidence from environmental psychology and aesthetics though suggests an evolutionary interpretation of preference. The finding that young children prefer depictions of savannah landscapes was interpreted as evidence for a phylogenetically developed system of preference [2]. [PERSON]'s Prospect and Refuge theory [3] is another strand of evidence suggesting that places offering an overview of the landscape as well as a site from which one can see without being seen would be preferred which has been validated empirically to some degree [4-6]. [PERSON] _et al_. [7] studied preference for different environmental scenes and finally postulated four predictor variables, namely mystery, complexity, coherence and legibility to account for preference judgments [8,9]. According to their theoretical framework those variables can be understood in terms of information gathering. Scenes high in mystery and complexity both promise a gain in information while coherence and legibility assures its comprehension. They link this information processing approach to an evolutionary perspective of preference by stating that human survival depends on constantly updating ones cognitive maps of the environment which would be served by a natural preference for places that offer new information while enabling its easy comprehension. With respect to the roles of cognition and affect in creating preferences they claim that automatic cognitive processes such as the identification of content and the extraction of potential informational gains would integrate into an affective code resulting in avoidance or approach behavior. This sort of automatic habitat selection seems reasonable to be innate to some degree; after all, it is not unprecedented in humans as many animals show this innate pattern of habitat selection [10]. [PERSON] and collaborators [11-15] investigated affective responses to environments and showed that affective appraisal of environments could reliably be reduced to the two dimensions valence and arousal by factor-analyzing subjects' ratings of landscapes on bipolar adjective pairs. The valence dimension of affect has been conceptualized as a behavioral tendency ranging from approach/appetitive to withdrawal/defense thus fitting neatly with [PERSON] and [PERSON] _et al_. [7-9] who proposed a role of affect in guiding interaction with the environment. Affect was in these studies defined as \"emotion expressed in language\" [13]. By definition, verbally reported affective appraisal could occur with no inner emotional feeling [16]. It has also been pointed out that subjects could rate a set of landscape depictions as being differently pleasant while the ongoing emotional state during this task could be steady boredom [16]. Most scholars agree that emotions consist of several components usually termed behavioral, physiological and mental which do not necessarily covary. Behavioral and language dimensions of arousal and valence are presumed to be roughly coupled [17]. Opposed to verbal measures of emotion, psychophysiological approaches to environmental psychology have been an exception thus far. A number of studies used indicators of autonomic arousal to study the effects of environmental stressors or the restorative qualities of places [18-20]. No reported study employed the startle modulation paradigm to study affective evaluation of environments. The present study examines if environmental scenes can alter not only verbally reported emotion, but also its physiological components by measuring the modulation of the eye-blink component of thestartle reflex. Our expectation was that an attractive environment results in a reduction of the startle reflex whereas an unattractive environment enhances it.