Toward a Layered Framework of Environmental Experience: Integrating Sensory, Perceptual, and Semantic Processes
Abstract
Environmental experience is shaped by sensory stimulation, perceptual organization, and semantic meaning, yet these dimensions are often studied in isolation or reduced to broad environmental categories. This fragmentation limits our ability to explain how environments are experienced, how bottom-up and top-down processes interact, and how person-environment relations can be studied in a mechanistically informative way. Here, we provide an integrative review of work spanning embodied cognition, predictive processing, environmental psychology, and related traditions, and use this synthesis to develop a human-centered framework of environmental experience. In this framework, environmental experience unfolds across three analytically separable but experientially intertwined dimensions: sensory, perceptual, and semantic. The sensory dimension concerns immediate stimulation and salience; the perceptual dimension concerns the organization of environmental input into coherent, action-relevant structure; and the semantic dimension concerns learned meaning, cultural interpretation, familiarity, and contextual relevance. We argue that these dimensions are not sequential stages, but parallel, co-active, and mutually constraining aspects of lived environmental engagement. We then outline methodological implications for studying both dimension-specific contributions and their interaction, emphasizing convergent, multimethod, and temporally sensitive designs spanning behavioral, physiological, neurocognitive, and computational approaches. The framework provides an integrative basis for moving beyond static or overly coarse descriptions of environments and toward a more precise account of how environmental experience emerges across brain, body, and world.
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BibTeX
@misc{huynh2026toward,
title = {{Toward a Layered Framework of Environmental Experience: Integrating Sensory, Perceptual, and Semantic Processes}},
author = {Dylan Chau Huynh and Aja Khalid Hussein and Farzaneh Behzadi and Amir Kalantarifard and Lars Brorson Fich and Andreas Møgelmose and Simone Kühn and Klaus Gramann and Zakaria Djebbara},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/m2urj_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/m2urj_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Toward a Layered Framework of Environmental Experience: Integrating Sensory, Perceptual, and Semantic Processes
AU - Dylan Chau Huynh
AU - Aja Khalid Hussein
AU - Farzaneh Behzadi
AU - Amir Kalantarifard
AU - Lars Brorson Fich
AU - Andreas Møgelmose
AU - Simone Kühn
AU - Klaus Gramann
AU - Zakaria Djebbara
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/02
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/m2urj_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/m2urj_v1/
AB - Environmental experience is shaped by sensory stimulation, perceptual organization, and semantic meaning, yet these dimensions are often studied in isolation or reduced to broad environmental categories. This fragmentation limits our ability to explain how environments are experienced, how bottom-up and top-down processes interact, and how person-environment relations can be studied in a mechanistically informative way. Here, we provide an integrative review of work spanning embodied cognition, predictive processing, environmental psychology, and related traditions, and use this synthesis to develop a human-centered framework of environmental experience. In this framework, environmental experience unfolds across three analytically separable but experientially intertwined dimensions: sensory, perceptual, and semantic. The sensory dimension concerns immediate stimulation and salience; the perceptual dimension concerns the organization of environmental input into coherent, action-relevant structure; and the semantic dimension concerns learned meaning, cultural interpretation, familiarity, and contextual relevance. We argue that these dimensions are not sequential stages, but parallel, co-active, and mutually constraining aspects of lived environmental engagement. We then outline methodological implications for studying both dimension-specific contributions and their interaction, emphasizing convergent, multimethod, and temporally sensitive designs spanning behavioral, physiological, neurocognitive, and computational approaches. The framework provides an integrative basis for moving beyond static or overly coarse descriptions of environments and toward a more precise account of how environmental experience emerges across brain, body, and world.
ER -