Chun-Yen Chang

National Taiwan University | NTU · Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture

Designers rely on sketching to visualize and refine their initial ideas, and virtual reality (VR) tools now facilitate sketching in immersive 3D environments. However, little research has been conducted on the differences in the visual and spatial processes involved in 3D versus 2D sketching and their effects on cognition. This study investigated p...

Background and objective: To effectively understand and communicate their work, landscape designers should possess excellent spatial abilities. Neurological methods have confirmed that activation of the occipital lobe, parietal cortex, and prefrontal cortex affect the judgment of space; however, few studies have measured spatial abilities in landsc...

While urban nature has been reported as positively associated with health and well-being, only a few research focused on the health-beneficial effects of the ecological quality of natural environments. When designing urban green spaces, there is a growing need for establishing rich biodiversity and creating spaces where residents can recover from d...

Multiple studies using various measures, technologies, and participant groups have found that exposure to urban green infrastructure can help alleviate the daily attentional fatigue that human experience. Although we have made significant progress in understanding the effects of exposure to urban green infrastructure on attention restoration, two i...

The current study investigated the differences between environmental volunteering program and natural experience program in natural benefits, place attachment and pro-environmental behaviours. Fifty-eight college students were recruited to participate in these two programs which were conducted in a highland farm. Comparing to those in natural exper...

Accessible urban greenery allows short breaks and leisure activities while experiencing nature. Studies have shown that contact with nature elicits psychological and physical health benefits. However, the immediate impact and influence of exposure to artificial versus rural ecological nature have yet to be examined. This study investigates their ps...

Research has confirmed that there are physical and mental benefits associated with performing horticultural activities, such as being in contact with soil and viewing plants. In addition, due to the rapidly increasing volume of affective neuroscience research, it is now possible to understand emotional processing in the brain through neuroimaging....

Exposure to natural landscapes can benefit human health. However, several knowledge gaps remain regarding the impacts of duration and cultural differences on the health benefits of nature. If these gaps are filled, designers and planners can better design landscapes for stress recovery. This study examined the effects of durations of virtual exposu...

With the growth of urbanization and the increasingly hectic pace of life, exposure to urban nature within blue-green infrastructure is greatly impacting human health and well-being. Biophilia, an evolutional concept, conveys the initial connection between humans and nature; biophilic design transfers into design attributes to indicate the relations...

This study investigated the effects of different natural environments on attention restoration and creativity. To compare the restorative benefits based on the degrees of perceived naturalness in urban areas, this study categorized environments into three types of perceived naturalness and tested the effect on one's creativity. The urban campus was...

Nature and health researchers have often suggested that nature induces better psychological and physical health responses than urban environments, especially with healthy ecosystems in nature. However, research that has empirically documented the daily benefits of physical and psychological health in rural landscapes is scarce. This study explores...

Urban natural spaces can be sites of psychological restoration that improve physiological well-being and contribute to overall health for people living in cities. Though our cities differ in composition and our cultures have different conceptions of nature, urban residents across the Pacific Rim appear to benefit from some interaction with nature...

Key Points • Built environments can promote or hinder mental health. • Urbanization is often associated with poor mental health. It is not urbanization per se, however, but specific features of urban life that influence mental health. Good design, based on evidence, can promote mental health. • Although urban settings with noise and traffic can inc...

The current protocol aims to showcase the technology integration, providing a detailed description of adopting the HealthCloud app, developed by the Healthy Landscape and Healthy People Lab, National Taiwan University (HLHP-NTU), on smartphones and smartwatches to collect data on users' real-time psychological and physiological responses and enviro...

Graphic design thinking is a key skill for landscape architects, but little is known about the links between the design process and brain activity. Based on Goel’s frontal lobe lateralization hypothesis (FLLH), we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brain activity of 24 designers engaging in four design processes—viewing,...

Increasing empirical research has confirmed the positive psychological effects of nature on human beings. However, limited studies have discussed the impact of daily exposure to nature. Employing a smartphone to record the daily impact of exposure to nature continuously over a seven-day period, this study examined the duration of exposure, perceive...

In natural spaces, people experience traditional environmental Qi (TEQ), which supports healthy environmental energy flow, and helps them gain an overall improved Qi experience from practicing Qigong. However, what kind of urban green spaces support Qigong? This study provides an analysis that measures TEQ, Qi experience, flow experience, restorati...

People release stress in urban environments by experiencing green areas, such as parks, grasslands, and areas with trees and hedges. For over 30 years, increasing studies have depicted the psychological and physiological health benefits of experiencing nature. However, recently, people have been staying in concrete environments without green spaces...

People experience a healthy energy gained from the environment and an inner feeling, called the Qi experience. The flow experience has been a popular topic in Western studies, especially within the fields of psychology and health, and in all kinds of activities. Our current study used quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the relationship...

A large number of empirical studies have confirmed that natural landscapes recover our fatigue from work and enhance our positive emotions. The Attention Restoration Theory (ART) mentions that the soft fascination of the environment stimulates our creativity. The study focuses on forest landscape and urban streetscape to evaluate which environments...

The study invited 12 experts to be Qi sensors to understand healthy landscape attributes of Tradition Environmental Qi (TEQ) in Eastern culture, which supports mind-body exercise. Through qualitative in-depth interviews with mind-body practitioners, the results extract the following seven healthy landscape attributes using ATLAS. ti 6.0: (1) landsc...

The Biophilia Hypothesis proposes that people have the instinct to be with nature and living bodies. Using the biophilic design can integrate nature into the built environment, thereby promoting health benefits such as physical and psychological health benefits, which is in line with related environmental psychology theories and Traditional Environ...

Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) is being implemented in cities around the globe. Although we know that GSI improves urban ecosystems in a variety of ways, we know little about the extent to which the characteristics of GSI impact human perception and preference. This gap in knowledge necessitates a greater understanding of the relationship be...

Studies have suggested that the heterogeneity and arrangement of landscape structures are influential to the faunal biodiversity of environments. How does the landscape structure in agricultural landscape arrangements improve the functions of the natural ecosystem? Previous research has uncovered a great amount of information on the relationships b...

As urbanization increases around the world and fewer and fewer people have easy access to completely natural places, there is a growing need to understand how the landscapes we design and inhabit impact our health and wellbeing.[...]

Over the years, the restorative benefits of the natural environment have been taken seriously. These restorative effects continue to be verified in research from both the psychological and physiological perspectives. The latest functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology provides an opportunity to further explore the psychophysiological...

The easy availability and widespread use of remotely-sensed imagery, especially Google Earth satellite imagery, makes it simple for urban forestry professionals to assess a site and measure tree cover density without visiting the site. Remotely-sensed tree cover density has become the dominant criterion for urban forestry regulations in many countr...

SUMMARY. There is a growing body of literature that explores the benefits of school gardening for children, but few studies have been conducted in Taiwan. Even fewer studies have examined which factors influence the benefits that children derive from these activities. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the benefits of school garden...

Promoting ecological health and human wellbeing are two fundamental goals in landscape sustainability. Green spaces are thought to improve users' psychological and physical wellbeing through the contact with nature. However, the results of some studies that rely on self-reports suggest that when the level of naturalness in a green space reaches a c...

The rapid increase in urban population worldwide is one among the important global environmental issues. The urban ecological system is made up of human society and environments. We cannot exclude humans from the urban ecosystem since humans are an integral component of landscape ecology. Bridging humans and landscape ecology is important to sustai...

Urban streetscapes are outdoor areas in which the general public can appreciate green landscapes and engage in outdoor activities along the street. This study tested the extent to which the degree of awareness of urban street trees impacts attention restoration and perceived restorativeness. We manipulated the degree of awareness of street trees. P...

There is growing evidence that landscapes impact human health and wellbeing. As any student of the landscape knows, this is not a new insight (see for instance New York City's Central Park) but there has been considerable interest in within the design and planning disciplines, within public health, and increasingly, within policy and management cir...

Many people do not seem to have interesting perceptual experiences while in contact with nature. To identify potential antecedents of positive perceptual experiences in natural settings, we investigated the role of a personal connection to nature on perceptual evaluation of preference-related environmental information in varying natural settings. T...

Forests provide various services and benefits, including national land conservation, water preservation, ecological conservation, forest recreation, and timber production. Although Japan established the first Forest Act as early as 1897, this article focuses on the period after World War II until now. Both Japan and Taiwan have established laws and...

This article focuses on discussion of several important mechanisms or issues related to the influence of urban landscape on human health, including the importance of biodiversity and related research methods; opportunities of developing a comprehensive green infrastructure and its effects on human health; how electronic technology would alter resea...

This dialogue emphasized the importance of exploring multiple impacts of urban landscapes on human health. We identified four main aspects of research on this topic: (1) The importance of this issue; (2) Empirical evidence regarding connection between landscape and human health; (3) How urban landscape influences social interactions; (4) The health...

To identify the visual characteristics that make a scene looks nature, we investigated the relationship between the distribution of spatial frequency spectrum of an image and its perceived naturalness. The image database contains outdoor images whose perceived naturalness were rated by human observers. Each image was Fourier transformed to the freq...

The built environment can promote or hinder mental health. Place attachment refers to the psychological and social connections people feel with certain places—their homes, the settings in which they grew up, and others. The conditions of modern life place great demands on—and often exhaust—our ability to pay attention. Green settings have the capac...

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship of environmental perception to preference and attentional restoration. Participants rated each of six natural settings using a 24 measured item questionnaire that assessed environmental perception, preference, attention restoration, and overall preference. Results showed that complexity and...

Scenes of natural areas were used as stimuli to analyze the psychological and physiological responses of subjects while viewing wildland scenes. Attention Restoration Theory [Kaplan, S., 1995. The restorative benefits of nature: toward an integrative framework, J. Environ. Psychol.15, 241–248.] and theorized components of restorative environments w...

From the viewpoint of the healthy landscape, the evaluation of the landscapes is not merely from the perspective of scenic beauty. Vegetation structure is an important indicator in measuring the "health" level of an environment. A healthy landscape carries the features of "diversity", which includes diversity of the vegetation structure, species, a...

The purpose of this paper was to report the effects of window views and indoor plants on human psychophysiological response in workplace environments. The effects of window views and indoor plants were recorded by measuring participant's electromyography (EMG), electroencephalography (EEG), blood volume pulse (BVP), and state-anxiety. Photo Impact...

This study tries to discuss the relationship between landscape structure and organisms in the perspective of landscape architecture. The research hypotheses were then proposed as (1) there are relationships between landscape structure indexes and birds' diversity in the rural areas of Taiwan; (2) the relationships between landscape structure and bi...

Compared to the number of studies on mental cognition, very few studies have described the effect of landscape on physical response. However, physical responses are the most precise and most easily evaluated factors for determining landscape benefits. Therefore, this study incorporated the psychophysical paradigm and therapeutic landscape theories...

This study examines the theoretical relationship between visitors' queuing time, crowding perception and satisfaction. Based on this relationship, a computer simulation written with the simulation software SIMAN IV was used as a practical tool to make recommendations to park planners. The simulation model was used in Yangmingshan National Park in T...

On-site participants(n=16) described their feelings and experiences in 3 ag-tourism areas in Miao-li, I-lan and Tai-tung county. The descriptions were then coded into 15 categories of concepts(e.g., "relax", "mystery", "reflection", "movement" , "control"…) and the descriptive sentences were transferring into a questionnaire consisted of 62 items t...

Scenes of natural areas were used as stimuli to analyze the psychological and physiological responses of subjects while view- ing wildland scenes. Attention Restoration Theory (Kaplan 1995) and theorized components of restorative environments were used as an orientation for selection of the visual stimuli. Conducted in Taiwan, the studies recorded...

Children develop their potential and acquire basic living skills through participating in daily activities. Potentially hindered by their specific symptoms, children with autism normally have their therapeutic activities indoors and rarely outdoors. Activities held outside could increase their opportunities for contact with the outdoor environment,...

Although many studies point out the benefits of natural space on human health, no true framework is available for planners and designers to follow. To understand the relationship between natural space and human health, this study uses Taipei city as the study area. The study adopts the data of personal healthy behavior and self-health perception it...