奇速英语

屋顶高的房子备受青睐！

When choosing the perfect house, many people choose high ceilings and a sense of space, despite high price and the higher cost of heating expense in the winter. Now a new study suggests that tall rooms excite the brain and encourage people to explore space, building on previous research that high ceilings are linked to a sense of freedom. A psychologist thinks that the combination of a room that promotes free thinking and is stimulating to the senses, which explains why people choose that kind of homes.

Dr Oshin Vartanian of the University of Toronto-Scarborough, told Fast Co Design: ‘On the one hand, rooms with high ceilings promote visuospatial exploration.” An international study, led by Dr Vartanian scanned the brains of volunteers while they looked at images of 200 rooms, half of which had high ceilings. Participants indicated whether each image was beautiful or not while in the FMRI scanner and the experts found that people were more likely to find spaces with high ceilings attractive, than those with low ceilings. This suggests that high ceilings capture people’s attention and stimulate the senses, encouraging people to explore the space they are in. But because the results didn’t show any difference in brain regions linked to pleasure or emotion, the study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, hints that high ceilings don’t instantly put people in a good mood.

In 2007, another study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, revealed that the height of ceilings affects how people think. Marketing experts Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu modified the height of ceilings in rooms to study how participants responded. They discovered that high ceilings seem to cause people to think more freely, encouraging creativity and abstraction, while lower ceilings promoted confined thinking. For example, one experiment placed volunteers in a room with a high 3 metre ceiling, while asking them to solve anagrams. They were able to complete work puzzles faster than those in a room with a lower ceiling.

Dr Vartanian said: ‘Knowing that people’s preference for rooms with higher ceilings might be driven by the ability of those spaces to promote visuospatial exploration helps partly explain why people opt to live in such spaces.”