Attractive Stepping Stones Landscapes: Preference for Stone Height Variation Appears to Be Age Independent

Abstract

An earlier study on the attractiveness of stepping stones configurations revealed that children like variation in stone height better than variation in stone size or gap width. In the present study, we conducted two experiments to examine whether this preference is found also in young and older adults. In Experiment 1, participants stepped freely in a standardized configuration, and three configurations with either height, size or gap width variation. Most interestingly, adults judged playgrounds with variation in stone height as most fun and beautiful, suggesting that the preference for variation in height is indeed age independent. In Experiment 2, we compared the configuration with only height variation with three configurations in which variation in height was combined with variation in stone size or gap width, or both. Although we found no significant differences among the configurations in the older adults, young adults judged the combination of height with size and gap width variation as more fun and esthetically appealing than the configuration with only height variation. The implications of our findings for playground research and designers are discussed.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Isa Kottink, Marit Smelt, Bram Schols, and Esmee Meilink for their assistance with running the experiments and the analyses of the videos. We thank Marieke van Heuvelen for advice on the statistical analyses. Two anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 In Jeschke et al. (2022), we used the Bonferroni-Dunn test (Siegel and Castellan, 1988) to detect the post-hoc differences. However, since the current data has more tied values, the Bonferroni-Dunn test was too conservative to detect which configurations differed from each other. Therefore, we chose to use the more powerful Conover post hoc test with Bonferroni correction in the present study.

2 Three young adults and one older adult occasionally crossed two gaps at once (respectively 2, 6, 1 and 7 times). These crossing were counted as two individual gap crossings in Figure 3, but as one crossing in the analysis of the general play behavior.

3 Two young adults one time crossed two gaps at once. This crossing was counted as two individual gap crossings in Figure 8, but as one crossing in the analysis of the general play behavior.