Does landscape related expertise influence the visual perception of landscape photographs? Implications for participatory landscape planning and management

Does expertise in landscape related issues influence the way landscapes are observed? In an eye tracking experiment 21 landscape experts and 21 laymen were asked to observe 74 landscape photographs, each for 10 s. Experts seemed to make significantly more fixations and saccades, had a longer scan path and a larger visual span than the laymen. As a consequence, in the same amount of time, experts visually explored the landscape photographs to a wider extent and in a more global and holistic fashion. This is probably due to the presence of expertise, which seemed to enhance efficient information extraction, enabling experts to interpret and understand the landscapes more easily. In contrast, the laymen's visual exploration of the landscapes was considerably more restricted as they spent significantly more time and attention to singular objects, in particular to buildings. This behaviour may be a result of the lack of expertise, which makes longer fixation times necessary to understand the meaning of the composing landscape elements. A slower information processing leaves less time to visually explore the landscape photograph and hampers laymen to observe the landscape as a whole. Consequently, experts and laymen may not perceive the same features in a landscape and might not even see the same landscape. This conclusion is important for participatory landscape management in which experts and laymen are asked to visually assess landscapes. The often diverging assessments of both groups could partially be explained by their literally different view on landscapes, on which their judgement is based.