From visual symbols to place attachment: the mediating role of cultural confidence in digital rural intellectual property (IP)—evidence from Ningxia

Introduction Digital rural intellectual property (IP) has become a practical means by which villages turn local distinctiveness into transmissible cultural assets, yet little is known about how its visual symbols relate to the emotional bond audiences form with a place, particularly in the ethnic autonomous regions of western China. Drawing on cultural identity theory and environmental psychology, this study examines cultural confidence as a statistical mediator between visual symbol perception and place attachment. Methods Survey responses from 541 people exposed to Ningxia digital rural IP were analyzed with second-order structural equation modeling. The stimulus set comprised eight examples: four marks with an identifiable holder and four account-issued renderings of shared regional motifs. Respondents evaluated the subset they reported having previously encountered. The indirect association was assessed through bias-corrected bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples. All coefficients are completely standardized. Results Visual symbol perception is positively associated with cultural confidence (0.580) and with place attachment (0.240), and cultural confidence is positively associated with place attachment (0.520). The indirect path accounts for 0.302 of a total association of 0.542, or roughly 56%. Scalar measurement invariance holds across local residents and non-local respondents, and no statistically significant cross-group difference was detected in any structural path, supporting pooling without establishing group equivalence. Discussion A modest direct path beside a larger indirect one is consistent with symbols relating to attachment largely through the value audiences assign to regional culture, although the cross-sectional design cannot establish that sequence. The visual-symbol-perception and cultural-confidence measures were reconstructed for this study and should be regarded as preliminary. The study brings environmental psychology and cultural communication into dialogue and points designers toward the cultural legibility of symbols.