Let the sun shine! Measuring explicit and implicit preference for environments differing in naturalness, weather type and brightness

Exposure to natural environments and daylight often coincides. From an evolutionary perspective on preference, both should be highly preferred as they were important components for survival. Furthermore, research has indicated that people generally have positive connotations with both daylight and nature. However, these two phenomena have mostly been studied separate from each other in two different research fields. In this article we present three studies in which effects of naturalness and daylight characteristics on preference are studied simultaneously. We investigated both explicit and implicit preference, using direct ratings of the scenes and an affective priming task, respectively. The scenes were manipulated across three dimensions; naturalness (nature vs. urban), brightness (light vs. dark), and weather type (sunny vs. overcast). Consistently, we found explicit preferences for natural, bright, and sunny scenes. In contrast, no evidence was found for an implicit preference for nature, brightness, or sunlight.