Over a five-day period in June 2010, rooms 18 and 19 at Temple Hoyne Buell Hall were converted into a makeshift laboratory for a study on human responses to variation in the ecological structure of landscapes. This project was led jointly by Professor Bill Sullivan and his visiting colleague, Dr. Chun-Yen Cheng of National Taiwan University. Their experiment studied the reactions of 78 Americans to images of digitally altered landscapes. Participants were asked to look at a series of midwestern landscapes that had been altered in Photoshop to look either ecologically healthy or unhealthy. Their verbal responses were recorded and their physiological responses were noted by EEG and EMG machines. In addition, their heart rates were monitored using photoplethysmography or BVP.

While this was the first time Sullivan had worked on an experiment involving a physiological component, Cheng has performed such experiments thousands of times throughout his career. In Taiwan, where he is a full professor in the Horticulture and Landscape Department, another identically administered experiment will be performed this fall on a similar number of Taiwanese students. The data from both studies will then be analyzed by Cheng's graduate students, a few of whom will be writing their theses on the subject.

Within the next year or so Sullivan and Cheng expect to publish their own findings from this experiment. In the meantime, Sullivan and Cheng will continue to collaborate on other things, such as Sullivan's fall class, The Built Environment and Human Health, which Cheng joins each Friday via Skype. Also, Sullivan will be traveling to Taiwan in September for a round of speaking engagements and to collaborate with National Taiwan University on a proposed study abroad program.

This study was funded in part by a Focal Point Grant from the Graduate College of the University of Illinois.

Sullivan and Cheng view data