Designing Attention—Research on Landscape Experience Through Eye Tracking in Nanjing Road Pedestrian Mall (Street) in Shanghai

To understand the attention distribution and visual cognition in streets, this study conducted an experiment on Nanjing Road Pedestrian Mall (Street) using Head-mounted eye-trackers. Participants’ attention distribution were analyzed via Area Of Interest (AOI) during real-life walking scenarios, combining with several experiment tasks (i.e., destination selection, point-of-interest photography, and in-depth interviews), to capture participants’ naturalistic decision-making. The study combined automatic semantic segmentation with manual audit to code participants’ attention fixation duration and proportion by AOIs. A new indicator „information density,” which is the ratio of the attention percentage to the exposure percentage of a given environmental element, was introduced to describe the efficiency of environmental elements on attracting attentions. Findings revealed information density varies across environmental elements: higher information density was found in sign, building entrance, brand name, and poster; the lower was found in building, sky, and ground; while tree and person fell in between. Findings hence suggest environmental elements of higher information density (such as business signs) should be systematically designed to enhance desired experiences. Findings also indicated that personalized experiences are more likely to induce positive associations about environment which eventually lead to place attachment.