Well-being and multisensory urban parks at different ages: The role of interoception and audiovisual perception

The aim of the present work was to verify whether the perception of visual and acoustic characteristics of urban parks is influenced by the age of the participants. Fifty young (average age 25 years) and fifty elderly (average age 66 years) people were shown with combinations of different types of urban parks (i.e., green, colorful parks and squares) and different types of sound (i.e., bird song, water, chattering and traffic). For each audio-video scenario, participants indicated how calm, happy and stimulated it made them feel and how pleasant, exciting and attractive each scenario was. In addition, participants performed a cross-modal attention task and filled out an interoceptive awareness questionnaire. The results showed that both young and elderly participants preferred green parks with natural sounds. In addition, elderly participants positively evaluated colorful parks over squares. Interestingly, young participants gave more importance to the evaluation of visual-only elements than auditory-only elements, whereas elderly participants gave more importance to the acoustic characteristics of scenarios than the visual ones. Finally, in the elderly group, both attentional abilities and interoceptive awareness contributed to the positive evaluation of urban parks. Theoretically, the results suggest that both signals from the body and from the external world contribute to a holistic representation of the environment. Cross-modal attention may play a crucial role in this process. On an applied level, the data suggest that the design of colorful parks and soundscapes that evoke nature should be encouraged, especially for older populations.