Neural representations underlying psychological responses to natural and artificial features in indoor architecture

This study examined the impact of naturalness and artificiality in indoor architecture on subjective evaluations, similarity judgments, and their neural responses. Thirty-six participants viewed 60 images of architectural interior scenes and performed a spatial arrangement task while undergoing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). They also provided ratings on aesthetic preference, naturalness, desire to be in the scene, and arousal. Results showed that naturalness had minimal impact on subjective judgments. However, lower-level visual features influenced perceived similarity more than subjective naturalness ratings. We observed no significant relationship between naturalness and similarity judgment outcomes. Next, we performed a Representational Similarity Analysis on neural activations, which revealed that the dissimilarity between natural and artificial interiors primarily occurred in the ventral visual processing stream without extending to other brain regions. Further post-hoc analysis indicated that the influence of lower-level visual features perceived in architectural scenes was mainly limited to visual processing areas. Our study suggests that further investigation is needed to understand the dimension of perceived similarity between naturalistic and artificial architecture and their neural correlates. • Naturalness in indoor architecture minimally affects subjective evaluations. • Lower-level visual features primarily influence perceived similarity of architectural scenes. • Neural dissimilarity between natural and artificial interiors is confined to the ventral visual processing stream with no significant effects in higher-order brain regions.