Summary and Analysis:
Keywords
View support quotes and references at the bottom of the page.
This paper belongs to the field of embodied cognitive science, one theoretical approach within cognitive science. Cognitive science broadly studies mind and intelligence from an interdisciplinary perspective (1). Embodied cognitive science, more specifically, argues that cognition is not confined to the brain alone, but involves the whole body in its engagement with the world (2).
The paper shows that this field is still developing and continues to clarify how mind, body, and environment interact dynamically. In this context, the integration of complementary ideas from psychology has been especially valuable, helping to strengthen both the theoretical and empirical foundations of the field. Concepts such as affordances (directly perceived possibilities for action based on a person’s physical abilities) are especially useful for explaining how people engage with their surroundings.
One of the main challenges in this area is that much of neuroscience still reduces people–environment relationships to isolated variables, rather than addressing their complexity in real-life settings. This is especially important because visual rhythms in actual environments are unlikely to occur in a strict oscillatory fashion: movement, saccades, and the structure of the environment introduce constant variation, making it difficult to precisely induce a specific frequency in sensory receptors. Because of this, an important opportunity lies in developing more integrated accounts of cognition (ones that understand the environment/person relationship as a continuous flow of interrelated signals that people can resonate with and become naturally attuned to). This could help generate more realistic models of human cognition and better inform the design of built environments (3).
This research is noteworthy because it explores how visual rhythmic stimulations in the built environment, as perceived through peripheral vision (the part of vision that detects what is around us, outside the direct focus of the eyes), may affect the brain and body. Based on a review of scientific literature, the paper argues that externally generated rhythmic stimulations can influence internal neural dynamics, shaping perception, movement, cognition, and behavior. It also proposes that the built environment should not be understood as a static object or reduced to isolated variables, but rather as a bundle of continuous and interrelated signals with which people can resonate and become naturally attuned.
The paper is also valuable because it brings together concepts such as resonance, neural entrainment, attunement, natural attunement, and rhythm into a broader framework for understanding mind/body/environment interaction. In this sense, the paper shows that resonance and entrainment can be understood as observable dynamic processes that support coordination between brain, body, and environment, while attunement refers more broadly to the experiential quality of being in tune with something or someone. Natural attunement, more specifically, refers to this experiential alignment as it emerges in relation to the environment. Overall, the research expands embodied cognition by showing why the rhythmic and perceptual qualities of the built environment deserve greater attention.
1. Relationship between the visual rhythm of the environment and movement
As we move, the environment is perceived as a dynamic visual flow that can enable or constrain certain activities. The visual rhythm of its elements, especially when perceived through peripheral vision, can influence how we move (4). Their frequency, spacing, and orientation can affect both the speed and direction of movement. For example, projected lines on walkways, roads, or tunnels, when they are denser, tend to induce slower movement, whereas more widely spaced patterns may favor greater speed (5). Likewise, the inclination of patterns in tiles can alter the direction of movement (6). It is also important to recognize that people’s bodily capacities, intentions, and walking speed also influence how the environment is perceived (7).
2. Visuospatial attention modulates perception of the environment
Perception of the environment does not occur continuously, but through rhythmic oscillations of visuospatial attention. This alternates between an exploratory mode, when visual information is unpredictable, and a more rhythmic mode, when the environment presents predictable events or information relevant to the person’s intention (8). Even when attention remains focused on a location that is important for intentional action, it continues to fluctuate between moments of heightened and reduced perceptual sensitivity, allowing other locations to be explored again and what is being attended to to be reassessed (9). This suggests that the experience of the built environment depends both on the salient features of space and on the person’s intention, since attention acts as an active mechanism of perceptual selection that calibrates which environmental information becomes relevant (10); at the same time, the environment can also capture intentional attention as it fluctuates.
3. Natural attunement to the rhythm of the environment
People can enter into natural attunement with the environment when, through rhythmic interaction with its qualities, a partial or complete alignment is generated between internal processes and external signals (11). This natural attunement can occur at different scales, from perception and action to more complex neural dynamics (12), and can influence cognition, perception, and behavior (13). In this process, environmental affordances are key, since they shape the way the brain registers sensory information and continuously responds to the environment (14). In addition, attunement to affordances and to the rhythms of space also affects affective experience (15).
The paper also shows that rhythm is not limited to regular repetition, but can be understood as a complex quality of movement, form, surprise, energy, or the spatiotemporal experience of the environment (16). In built environments, these rhythms can be expressed through doors, pavements, windows, columns, and other elements of architectural space (17), helping orientation and navigation, even in multisensory ways. However, the paper also warns that some external signals, such as acoustic noise, may interfere with internal processes and disrupt neural communication (18).
4. There are several means of rhythmic stimulation in the built environment
Rhythmic stimulation in the built environment can occur in different ways and is not limited to regular repetition. It can be achieved through the use of lighting and atmospheres, massive structures, patterns, materials, form, spatial configurations, oppositions or tensions, the intensity and quality of experience, or by inviting us to see things in a particular way (19). Architectural elements that constrain our movement and attention can lead us toward a particular type of experience to which we may become attuned, and the quality of this attunement can also vary (20). Patterns are rhythmic means that appear across history and cultures and are well known to designers; this may be because they facilitate a process of attunement (21).
5. Systemic dynamic relationship between mind, body, and environmental rhythms
Mind, body, and environmental rhythms influence one another and operate dynamically as a system through relational physical processes (22). Their dynamic coupling can activate automatic sensorimotor responses that may be experienced as natural attunement (23). These automatic responses may also be supported by people’s previous experiences, habits, or culture (24).
Health & Wellbeing: The findings support this theme by showing that rhythmic visual stimulation in the built environment, particularly as perceived through peripheral vision, can shape cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral processes, including attention, movement, and affective experience. The paper suggests that natural attunement to environmental rhythms and affordances may influence how people think, feel, and act in space, while disruptive signals, such as acoustic noise, can interfere with internal processes. Together, these findings reinforce the idea that wellbeing is shaped not only by what environments do, but by how they are sensorily and rhythmically structured.
Place Attachment: Since attunement is described as an experiential alignment with aspects of the surrounding world, the findings suggest that connection to place may also emerge through embodied and perceptual engagement. This is especially relevant because attunement can shape affective experience like how a place is felt, emotionally registered, and remembered over time, rather than depending only on symbolic meaning or explicit memory.
Joy & Recreation: The research indicates that rhythmic visual stimuli and perceptually coherent environments can make movement and exploration feel smoother and more enjoyable. Joy may emerge from the embodied experience of being in sync with a place, not only from its functional qualities or meaning.
Design for peripheral vision, movement, attention, and time, not only for frontal viewing.
The paper suggests that architecture should not be designed only as a static image seen from the front, but as a dynamic sequence of sensory cues perceived through peripheral vision while moving through space and over time. Designing with movement, attention, and temporal unfolding in mind may help support more intuitive and attuned spatial experience.
Use rhythm and affordances as experiential design tools.
Rhythm and affordances shape how people register sensory information, respond to their surroundings, and affectively experience space. This means designers can work with rhythm not only as repetition, but as a broader experiential quality expressed through movement, form, energy, surprise, and the spatiotemporal unfolding of the environment. Doors, pavements, windows, columns, and other architectural elements can all contribute to this. Moreover, architectural elements that constrain movement and attention can steer people toward particular modes of experience to which they may become attuned, and the quality of that attunement may vary.
Create rhythmic stimulation through multiple environmental qualities.
The findings suggest that rhythmic stimulation can emerge through lighting, atmosphere, structures, patterns, materials, spatial configurations, oppositions or tensions, and the intensity or quality of experience itself. In this sense, rhythm becomes a multisensory and perceptual strategy, not just a formal one.
Design for navigation as a multisensory and temporal experience.
Since people can become attuned to different environmental features in ways that support orientation, designers can strengthen navigation not only through signage, but through tactile, acoustic, visual, and rhythmic cues that unfold over time and help movement through space feel easier to read and follow.
Avoid sensory conditions that disrupt attunement.
The paper also shows that some external signals, such as acoustic noise, may interfere with internal processes. This suggests that design should not only create meaningful rhythmic stimulation, but also reduce sensory conditions that may produce confusion, overload, or perceptual disruption.
Treat the built environment as a temporal experience, not only as form.
The findings suggest that the built environment is experienced as a continuous flow of interrelated signals rather than as a static object. This means design should consider how rhythm, attention, and perception unfold dynamically over time as people move, pause, turn, and reorient themselves in space.
References
1 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Cognitive science. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved March 16, 2026, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognitive-science/
2 Wilson, M., & Golonka, S. (2016). Embodied cognition. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 ed.). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/embodied-cognition/
3 Charalambous, E., & Djebbara, Z. (2023). On natural attunement: Shared rhythms between the brain and the environment. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 155, 105438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105438
Support text
4. “During movement, the perceivable structure of the built environment that constrains or affords different activities can change in a periodic manner. The rate of change of visual input flow in urban spaces or the interior of buildings is often rhythmic or has temporal regularities able to entrain, for example, neural oscillations of sensory receptors in peripheral vision. Evidence suggests that the sensed rate of change of visual elements in optical flow appears to modulate walking speed.” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 7)
5.”Ludwig et al. (2018) projected vertical lines with varying distances on the floor of a walkway and reported a decrease in walking speed when traversing a pattern of lines with a high frequency as opposed to a low frequency. That is, the fast changes in the peripheral vision suggest that one is moving fast whereas the natural behavioral adjustment is to slow down. Modulations in speed have also been reported in a driving simulation study. By changing the width of the vertical lines that appeared in a rhythmic visual pattern along a tunnel, it was demonstrated that speed adjustments could be controlled” (Manser and Hancock, 2007 as cited in Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 7)
6. “Further evidence of implicit behavioral effects of natural attunement was reported by Leonards and colleagues (Leonards et al., 2015), who investigated the impact of tile-pattern direction on the walking direction. Their findings suggest that in contrast to significant rotations, subtle rotations of tile patterns (close to the straight line) resulted in participants veering away from the straight trajectory. Overall, these behavioral effects suggest that the rhythmic structure of environmental features may trigger processes related to natural attunement” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 7)
7. “However, the phase of the external signal depends greatly on the movement of the body. Adults’ typical walking speeds vary depending on several variables, including age, level of fitness, health, and terrain. On flat ground, however, the typical average walking speed for adults is generally thought to be between 4.8 and 6.4 kilometers per hour (Fitzpatrick et al., 2006). This pace can change depending on the individual and may be influenced by factors like the purpose of the walk (e.g., stroll vs. brisk walk), the terrain (e.g., uphill vs. downhill), and other individual factors such as age (Montufar et al., 2007). Due to their physical condition, walking style, or personal preferences, some people may walk slower or faster than the average of a normally distributed estimate of walking speed.” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 9)
8. “It has been proposed that active sensing of the environmental space is facilitated by dynamic periodicities in visuospatial attention (4 – 8 Hz) alternating between two modes of sampling: an exploratory mode as a continuous exploration of space when visual information is unpredictable, and a rhythmic mode in the presence of predictable events and of perceptual information relevant to the agent’s intention (Gaillard and Ben Hamed, 2022; Schroeder et al., 2010; VanRullen, 2018)” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 7)
9. “Even when attention is sustained at a behaviorally relevant location, there is a rhythmic fluctuation between periods of heightened and reduced perceptual sensitivity (Fiebelkorn and Kastner, 2019; Helfrich et al., 2018; Lakatos et al., 2008; Landau and Fries, 2012). During epochs of reduced perceptual sensitivity, attention can be shifted to explore other locations and reassess the value of the object of attention. Furthermore, it has been speculated that the resonant frequency of neural networks can be under top-down control of attention, which can, in turn, modulate bottom-up entrainment effects (Helfrich et al., 2017, 2018, 2019).” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 7)
10. “If attention operates as a process at the higher-level intentional scale that supports the detection of ecological information based on our intentions, then a constraint on the resonant attentional networks can also modulate the entrainment of neural oscillations driven by sensory input flow. Brain rhythms are thus used as active instruments of perceptual selection, calibrating (and calibrated by) attention to external input based on its extrinsic structural salience or its intrinsic value, e.g., the agent’s intention (Gaillard and Ben Hamed, 2022).” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 7)
11. “Nonetheless, in many cases, the experience of attunement is a result of being entrained to some degree. We can naturally become attuned to qualities encountered through our rhythmic interaction and coupling with the world…Attunement captures the sense of connection we feel with a particular thing, event, or person. ‘Natural Attunement’, may arise from a state of partial or complete entrainment.” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 7)
12. “…natural attunement can happen on a variety of scales, from perception and action to complex neural dynamics caused by actual environments.” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 8)
13. “We argue that the alignment of a person’s neural and physiological processes with the environment can influence their cognition, perception, and behavior” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 8)
14. “A key concept to elucidate natural attunement stems from ecological psychology, namely sensing the affordances that are available in the environment. Affordances shape the way the brain registers sensory information and the continuous response (Bonner and Epstein, 2017; Cisek, 2007; Djebbara et al., 2021). ” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 8)
15. “Natural attunement to the affordances of the environment also has an impact on the affective experience.” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 8)
16. ” In his recent book, Vara Sánchez (2023) explores various perspectives on the notion of rhythm, for instance, rhythm as movement, form, energy, and even of rhythmic events as consisting of time-space-energy (i.e., Lefebre’s view) or of time-rhythms and affect-rhythms (i.e., Nietzche’s view). One of the most relevant to architectural experience is Plato’s view, which is that rhythm is order in movement as opposed to seeing rhythm as a regular construction of patterns (Vara Sánchez, 2022)” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 8)
17. “In the built environment, rhythmic structures are present not only in the urban fabric but can be also expressed in the design of doors, pavements, windows, columns, and other architectural elements” (Chan, 2012).” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 8)
18. “We can also enhance our navigational skills by becoming attuned to different features in the environment. For example, attunement to the tile pavement for impaired people in urban areas enhances their perception of the environment by translating the rhythm of the tiles into auditory and haptic sensory wave-like input flows. Given this extraordinary neural capacity, it is, however, also possible for an external signal to interfere with internal signals and disrupt neural communication. Exposure to acoustic noise, for instance, can negatively affect the processing of speech in the auditory cortex, making it harder to understand spoken words.” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 8)
19. “This is because rhythmic stimulation by the built environment can occur through several mediums. For instance, Olafur Eliasson is famous for finding innovative ways of playing with rhythm through light and atmosphere… while Santiago Calatrava manages to obtain a similar rhythmic effect through repetition of massive structures… Rhythm can be linked to the experience of a tension between oppositions and the particular way in which something appears to us and in turn affects us and our rhythms (Vara Sánchez, 2023).We can become attuned not because of a repetitive wave-like rhythm, but due to the quality of the event and the invitation to look at things in a particular way.” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 8)
20. “Such architectural elements that constrain our movement and attention invite us to a particular form of experience to which we become attuned…it is worth mentioning that there are different qualities of rhythm that we can experience in the built environment.” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 8)
21. “…(1) the unit and quantification of naturally occurring rhythmic stimulations can emerge in various forms and through various modalities and (2) though used often, rhythms and patterns are by no means novel to architects. However, their relation to the brain remains an untouched potential that could explain the transhistorical existence of rhythms and patterns throughout numerous cultures independently …Patterns, beyond their visual aesthetics, may have been attractive due to the emerging natural attunement when interacting with the built environment.” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 8, 9)
22. “Expectedly, different brains, bodies, and environments rhythms influence each other through different physical relational processes and, according to enactivist views are “dynamically coupled in a way that forms a system” (Gallagher, 2017, p. 8)” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 11)
23. “Dynamic coupling between our brains and bodies with environmental features, defined neurophysiological mechanisms of neural entrainment can trigger automated sensorimotor responses (Djebbara et al., 2022), which we can experience as natural attunement. This is only possible due to the existence of multiple interconnected rhythms. Although patterns continue to make up a large part of our homes, cities, and workplaces, the concept of rhythms (and thereby time and action) remain arguably dimensions not yet fully explored.” (Charalambous & Djebbara, 2023, p. 11)
24. “The contingency between sensory and motor processes is a critical feature for the emergence of perception (Di Paolo et al., 2017; O’Regan and No ̈e, 2001), and thus occurs without deliberate attention. Due to limited cognitive resources, it is necessary for such automatic processes to strategically rely on prior experiences, habits, cultural norms, etc., which in turn allows freeing up mental capacity for other purposes. According to the predictive coding hypothesis of the brain, automatic processes depend on ascending prediction errors conveying unexpected information through various sensory channels not anticipated by descending signals (Friston, 2010).” (Charalambous y Djebbara, 2023, p. 9,10)
Join and experience more as a Member
Access all our publications
Attend our events and access recordings
Offers from Partners in our network
Support the Conscious Cities movement!
Receive updates on new content and events
Cancel any time
