Research Design Connection People and Places

Our opinions of people influence our evaluations of places. Assessments of familiar individuals transfer to imagined places that are linked to them; knowing about this tie may be useful when synthesizing research findings, for example. Benoit, Paulus and Schacter found that, “Humans have the adaptive capacity for imagining hypothetical episodes. Such episodic simulation is based on a neural network…This network draws on existing knowledge (e.g., of familiar people and places) to construct imaginary events (e.g., meeting with the person at that place)…In two experiments, we demonstrate how imagining meeting liked versus disliked people (unconditioned stimuli, UCS) at initially neutral places (conditioned stimuli, CS) changes the value of these places…attitude changes induced by the liked UCS are based on a transfer of positive affective value between the representations (i.e., from the UCS to the CS)…mere imaginings shape attitudes towards elements (i.e., places) from our real-life environment.”

Roland Benoit, Philipp Paulus, and Daniel Schacter. 2019. “Forming Attitudes Via Neural Activity Supporting Affective Episodic Simulations.” Nature Communications, vol. 10, article number 2215, https://www.nature.com/articles/s1467-019-09961-w

Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.