Abstract
Cultural-historical places, due to their strong symbolic sense of place shared in various people, have important impacts on people's cognitive and emotional reactions. Especially, the visual characteristics of surrounding areas of cultural -historical places directly influence the way the places are perceived, because they function as a visual background of the places. This study examined how the visual characteristics of surrounding landscape of cultural-historical places nfluenced the perception of the places. The visual characteristics of the surrounding landscape was minipulated by a computer simulation in the two aspects; quality and scale. The quality of the simulated landscape was divided by two kinds : natural and artificial . The scale of the simulated landscape was classified by three kinds : 1/3 of the middle ground, 2/3, and 3/3. Specifically, in each photo simulation, simulated natural or artificial background was introduced up to 1/3, 2/3 or the full height of historic monument. After a computer simulation, people's cognitive and emotional reactions to the simulated slides were investigated. The results showed that the quality of surrounding landscape have a great impact on all the cognitive and emotional reactions investigated. On the vontrary, the scale of surrounding landscape was found to habve an impact on partial reactions, such as all the emotions, part of the cognitions, and visiting preference only. The results revealed that the visual characteristics of surrounding landscape should be considered as the crucial elements in planning of cultural-historical places. Based on the study results, several suggestions were made for the landscape planning and conservation for cultural-historical places and historic cities.