The Impact of Visual Stimuli and Properties on Restorative Effect and Human Stress: A Literature Review

Restorative environments are known as places where human stress can be decreased through restoration of depleted psychological resources. Since the efficiency of natural environments in restoration is supported by the literature, designing a restorative built environment can be obtained by integrating natural objects into built environments. However, various factors may lead to the failure of design intentions in real restorative environments such as visual stimuli and their properties. In addition, previous literature has widely used images and immersive virtual environments (IVEs) to deliver restorative environments in the design stage, and the impact of the delivery methods on visual properties needs to be considered. Therefore, the key to this study is to investigate the impact of visual stimuli and their properties on restoration along with the type of delivery method. To achieve this objective, the authors performed a literature review in two main steps. During the first step, the authors reviewed restoration and visual studies separately to understand the restoration and visual processes. Then, the second step of the review was conducted based on the results from the first step to review studies investigating the impact of different visual stimuli and properties on restoration. The literature review was conducted by combining scientometric analysis with a systematic review. In total, 1608 publications were retrieved from the Web of Science for scientometric analysis after applying search criteria. Then, the authors explored cluster reports generated by scientometric analysis to find publications for a systematic review based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. According to the results from a systematic review of 65 publications, the authors developed a restoration pathway and a visual processing framework for the first step, and a framework of visual stimuli, visual properties, and restoration for the second step.