With people spending up to 90% of their time in indoor spaces, windows and the visual connection that they afford to the outside, can play an important role in ensuring physical and psychological well-being. This is particularly relevant in urban settings, a substantial part of our lives, whilst still being significantly understudied. What we know from other environments may not translate to cities, and there may be important differences between the expressed preferences of individuals and their behaviour. Therefore, this study sought to define suitable methods and metrics to measure view preference in urban environments. Participants were asked to observe urban views whilst three types of data were collected: subjective preference ratings; eye-tracking measures and verbal reasoning. We found that when views were preferred, the gaze of the observers was more exploratory, with a higher occurrence of fixations and number of saccades. In addition, participants tend to prefer the presence of people, well-maintained buildings and orderly presented colours. A new link was revealed between the degree of visual exploration and the preference rating of a visual scene. This characteristic pattern of oculomotor behaviour may guide the criteria for framing selected views and accordingly inform window design in buildings.

人们将多达90％的时间都花在室内空间中，窗户和他们与外界的视觉联系可以在确保身心健康方面发挥重要作用。这在我们生活中很大一部分的城市环境中尤为重要，同时仍被大量研究。我们从其他环境中了解到的信息可能无法转化为城市，并且个人表达的偏好与其行为之间可能存在重要差异。因此，本研究试图定义合适的方法和度量标准，以衡量城市环境中的视野偏好。要求参与者观察城市景观，同时收集三种类型的数据：主观偏好评分；眼动追踪措施和言语推理。我们发现，当首选视图时，观察者的目光更具探索性，注视次数和扫视次数更多。此外，参与者倾向于喜欢有人在，维护良好的建筑物和有序呈现的颜色。在视觉探索的程度和视觉场景的偏好等级之间揭示了一个新的联系。动眼行为的这种特征性模式可以指导选择视图的取景标准，并相应地通知建筑物的窗户设计。