Stand in front of a window overlooking an open clearing, a waterway glinting in the distance, and a solitary tree to lean against—and something in your body relaxes before you’ve had time to think a single thought. The exact same reaction occurs in front of a poster featuring a vast landscape. It’s no coincidence, and it’s not just a matter of personal taste. Environmental psychologists say that the way we rest our gaze on certain views has been shaped by almost two million years on the African savanna. This article explores why a landscape poster can genuinely lower your heart rate—and what the research actually supports, beyond vague claims that nature is good for us.
Quick facts: In John Balling and John Falk’s classic 1982 study, published in the journal Environment and Behavior, participants ranked five habitats—savanna, deciduous forest, coniferous forest, tropical rainforest, and desert. The savanna won. The preference was strongest among children aged eight to eleven, before cultural learning had had time to shape their tastes. The theory’s origins go back even further: British geographer Jay Appleton introduced the concepts of prospect and refuge in his book The Experience of Landscape back in 1975.
Prospect-refuge: the theory that explains why we want to see without being seen
Jay Appleton’s idea is surprisingly simple once you hear it. A place feels safe and appealing when it offers two things at once: the ability to survey the surroundings (prospect) and the ability to be sheltered and unseen (refuge). To see without being seen. Anyone who could watch for both prey and danger from a protected position simply had better odds of surviving and passing on their genes.
That’s why a dense forest, however green, rarely inspires the same sense of well-being as an open view with a tree canopy or a cliff in the foreground. The forest offers shelter but no overview. The desert and the bare grassland offer an overview but no shelter. The savanna—with its scattered trees, low bushes, and long sightlines—combines both. Environmental psychology researchers describe it this way: the brain still reads a landscape according to how well it balances openness and shelter, long before we have time to assess it consciously.
It also explains a detail that recurs throughout art history: how often landscape painters place a viewing point in the foreground—a hill, a tree, a pier—where the eye can “stand safely” while the gaze wanders toward the horizon. A good landscape poster does the same thing. It gives you a place to rest and a vast expanse to dream into.
The savanna hypothesis and Balling & Falk’s study of children
The prospect-refuge theory was joined by a more specific idea: the savanna hypothesis, formulated by evolutionary biologist Gordon Orians and psychologist Judith Heerwagen in 1992. They proposed that humans carry an inherited attraction to the very environment in which the genus Homo spent most of its development—the East African savanna.
This is where Balling and Falk’s study comes in. When they asked children and adults to rate pictures of the five biomes, the savanna was consistently the most popular, especially among the youngest participants. This challenges the idea that the preference is purely learned, since Swedish children can hardly have a cultural connection to the African savanna. Another recurring finding is that a lush, green savanna is preferred to a dry, parched one—precisely the version that, during the rainy season, signaled food, water, and survival.
"We don’t prefer landscapes because they’re beautiful—they feel beautiful because we once needed them."
The research is not without its critics. Later studies have shown that familiarity and the nature of one’s home region play a major role, and several researchers argue that preference extends beyond savanna alone—to varied, semi-open landscapes in general. But the core idea holds up: we are systematically drawn to views with openness, scattered greenery, and the presence of water. It’s no coincidence that lakes, rivers, and coastlines appear in the landscape art of just about every people.
The Kaplans’ preference matrix: four qualities that determine whether a view feels right
If prospect-refuge explains why, psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan offer a tool for how. Their preference matrix identifies four qualities that together determine how much we like a scene—and they can be used as a checklist when choosing an image for your wall.
Coherence and complexity
Coherence is about the image holding together, with its parts forming an intelligible whole that the eye can quickly organize. Complexity is about having enough to look at to keep our interest alive. The two pull in opposite directions, and the magic lies in the balance: a scene that’s too empty is boring, while one that’s too cluttered is stressful. A landscape poster with a clear horizon but rich detail in the foreground often strikes the right balance.
Legibility and mystery
Legibility is the feeling that you could move through and find your way around a landscape without getting lost. Mystery is the opposite, and it draws us in: the promise that there is more to discover around a bend in the path, behind a hill, in the haze in the distance. According to the Kaplans’ research, mystery is one of the strongest predictors of whether we’ll be drawn to a view. That’s why a road disappearing around a corner or a river winding toward the horizon feels so inviting—the image asks us to keep looking.
Tip: Want to test a poster against Kaplan’s matrix? Ask yourself: is there a point in the foreground where your gaze can rest, a horizon to look toward, and something partly hidden that draws your eye onward? If you answer yes to all three, the image has good odds of feeling right in the long run—not just at first glance.
But we also love our own forests—the role of familiarity
If the savanna hypothesis were the whole truth, a Swede would long more for an African grassland than for spruce forests and archipelagos. That’s clearly not the case, and this is where the other pillar of the research comes in: familiarity. Recent studies testing landscape preferences across different biomes show that the environment you grew up in and recognize carries considerable weight, sometimes more than the inherited attraction to savannas. The two forces don’t contradict each other—they work together.
For a Nordic viewer, this means that the deep coniferous forest, the mirror-still inland lake and the barren mountain expanse carry a double charge. They appeal both to the ancient preference for openness and water and to the personal familiarity of a place we call home. This is part of what explains why Swedish landscape art, from the National Romantic era onward, resonates so deeply: the images are both evolutionarily appealing and culturally rooted. A misty lake in the light of dawn is not just a beautiful view; it’s a childhood summer memory disguised as art.
In practice, this means you don’t have to choose between the exotic and the familiar. A vast mountain landscape, an archipelago view or a clearing in the morning mist can carry the whole load—openness, water, shelter and familiarity in the same image. That’s often where the most striking walls come from: at the intersection of what the eye recognizes and what instinct longs for.
From theory to wall: how to choose landscape posters that rest the eyes
The beauty of this research is that it can be applied in practice. If you want a wall to lower your pulse rather than raise it, lean toward images with depth and space: a landscape poster featuring nature where your gaze can wander from a clear foreground to an open horizon. Water is an almost foolproof ingredient—a lake, a misty fjord or a coastline activates the same deep-seated attraction described by the savanna hypothesis.
Color tone also affects how restful a landscape is for the eyes. Cool, muted tones - blue-green mists, gray-blue waters, soft earth tones - are read by the brain as calm and distance, while sharp, saturated contrasts draw attention and work better where you want energy than where you want to unwind. A landscape with tonal harmony, where colors blend into one another toward the horizon, enhances the sense of depth and stillness.
In the bedroom and reading nook, where relaxation is the whole point, muted, atmospheric views work best. Here, landscape photography and evocative morning mists also fit, as do the calm tones of minimalist posters that create a sense of horizon without imposing themselves. In a home office, a more mysterious view - a path disappearing among the trees - can give your gaze somewhere to rest between work sessions without making the room feel sleepy.
For those who want to bring nature closer, botanical posters are a complementary choice: they answer the same longing for greenery, albeit on a smaller scale. And think about the format. A vast landscape almost always benefits from a horizontal format and generous size - width is where the expanse gets room to breathe. If you want to understand how a view works with a room’s proportions, we’ve written more about it in our guide to visual balance and the golden ratio.
It’s also worth knowing that the effect isn’t just aesthetic. Our review of nature imagery and stress reduction shows that exposure to images of nature can lower measurable stress markers, and the same thinking underpins the whole idea of biophilic design, which deliberately brings nature’s forms and rhythms into interior design. In other words, a preference for landscapes isn’t an isolated curiosity, but one piece of a bigger story about how the spaces we live in affect our well-being.
Size, format and viewing distance
A vast landscape loses its impact when squeezed into a small frame. The expanse needs width to feel expansive. Above a sofa or bed, horizontal prints in 50x70 or 70x100 centimeters often work best, while a truly panoramic view can go bigger and take up the whole wall. The rule of thumb is that a single print should cover around two-thirds of the furniture beneath it, so the image and furniture read as one unit rather than two separate objects.
Also consider how far away the viewer is from the image. In a reading nook where you sit close, a smaller format with fine foreground detail is enough, since your eyes have time to wander through the scene. In a large living room where the picture is viewed from a distance, however, a generous format with a clear horizon works better, because it is the depth and open space that carry from afar. If you hang several landscapes together, let them share a horizon line or lighting mood – then the wall feels like one continuous window onto nature rather than a collection of disconnected views.
Frequently asked questions about landscape art and landscape preferences
The next time a landscape poster stops you in your tracks, remember that the reaction is older than all of art history combined. If you want to give your eyes a sense of space to rest in, explore our full selection of nature prints – choose a scene with a reassuring foreground, an open horizon, and a touch of mystery, and let a two-million-year-old instinct help you decorate your home.