Abstract.The main goal of this study is to apply a scientific quantitative approach to the investigation of contextual fit. This is approached mathematically within the framework of cognitive science and research on categorization and prototypes. Two experiments investigated two leading mathematical-cognitive approaches for explaining people’s judgment of contextual fit of a new building with an architectural/urban context: prototype approach and feature frequency approach. The basic concept is that people represent the built environment via architectural prototypes and/or frequencies of encountered architectural features. In the first experiment, a group of twelve participants performed rank order tasks on artificially created architectural patterns, for the purpose of psychological scaling. Perceptual distances among all patterns were mathematically determined. In the second experiment, three groups of architectural patterns were constructed to represent assumed architectural contexts. The prototype of each context was mathematically determined according to prototype cognitive model, and based on the distances calculated in the first experiment. Fifty-six students participated in the main experiment, in which they rank ordered a group of fifteen architectural patterns in terms of contextual fit to each of the three architectural contexts. Participants’ rank order data of the fifteen patterns were regressed on both the perceptual distances from prototypes, and numbers of features shared with each architectural context. Results indicated that both prototype and feature frequency approaches significantly accounted for important portions of participants’ judgments. However, participants tended to prefer one approach to the other according to context composition. Results have implications for both research on utilizing cognitive-mathematical models in architectural research and on urban design guidelines and control.

中文翻译：

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用于评估建筑语境契合度的认知数学方法

摘要：本研究的主要目标是将科学的定量方法应用于情境契合度的调查。这是在认知科学和分类和原型研究的框架内以数学方式处理的。两个实验调查了两种主要的数学认知方法，用于解释人们对新建筑与建筑/城市环境的环境匹配的判断：原型方法和特征频率方法。基本概念是人们通过建筑原型和/或遇到的建筑特征的频率来表示建筑环境。在第一个实验中，一组 12 名参与者对人工创建的建筑模式执行排序任务，目的是进行心理测量。所有模式之间的感知距离是用数学方法确定的。在第二个实验中，构建了三组建筑模式来代表假定的建筑环境。根据原型认知模型，并根据第一个实验中计算的距离，在数学上确定每个上下文的原型。56 名学生参加了主要实验，他们根据与三种建筑环境中的每一种的环境契合度对一组 15 种建筑模式进行排序。参与者对 15 种模式的排名顺序数据在与原型的感知距离和与每个建筑环境共享的特征数量上进行回归。结果表明，原型和特征频率方法都显着地占了参与者判断的重要部分。然而，根据上下文构成，参与者倾向于选择一种方法而不是另一种方法。结果对在建筑研究中利用认知数学模型和城市设计指南和控制的研究都有影响。