ABSTRACT
The immediate, here-and-now, on-site impressions of landscape experienced by persons seem to the author to embody the central psychological issues of landscape research, either directly or indirectly. Everyday perception is an active process, guided by psychological sets and other cognitive processes. Persons encounter landscape settings with something like a plan to attend to and process certain kinds of information about it. In everyday life, of course, these cognitive sets are seldom so intentional or explicit and are instead organized around psychological factors, such as the role the person is enacting at the time or the individual’s personality dispositions. An intriguing question related to landscape meanings and values is whether the experience of landscape qua landscape is itself a function of cognitive set or role enactment. Individuals categorise physical landform and land use patterns by the use of concepts such as ‘mountain’, ‘seashore’, and ‘meadow’.
