It would seem that the psychology of perception should have something useful to contribute to landscape aesthetics. Certainly, students of landscape aesthetics make assumptions about the nature of perception. Although certain of these favorite assumptions are probably false, there was a time when it was not obvious that the psychology of perception had anything better to offer. Fortunately, a number of recent developments shed considerable light on the significance and functioning of the aesthetic reaction to landscapes.

From the perspective of landscape aesthetics, perhaps the single most salient theme in recent work in perception is what Gibson (1977) has labeled “affordances.” An affordance refers to what a perceived object or scene has to offer as far as the individual perceiver is concerned. Perception is viewed as not merely dealing with information about the environment, but also yielding information about what the possibilities are as far as human purposes are concerned. In addition to Gibson's contribution to this topic, this emphasis on the function that an object or environment might serve for the perceiver has appeared in the work of Gregory (1969) and S. Kaplan (1975).

One can go a step farther than the perception of affordances per se. As Charlesworth (1976) has pointed out, a species not only has to be able to recognize the sorts of environments in which it functions well, but also has to prefer them. Animals have to like the sort of settings in which they thrive.