Landscape Design and Cognitive Psychology

Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City remains one of the most important books in environmental design research. Its approach relies upon behavioral observations and systematic surveys of environmental cognition. We can perceive only what we see; thus, sight is the most important sense in landscape design. The spaces and objects of landscape design are stored temporallyin the mind; they cannot be used by visitors. In this paper, the importance of cognitive psychology in landscape design is examined, and the concepts of imageability and mental maps are discussed.