Environmental attitude shifts as revealed by landscape tastes and activity preferences

Summary The environmental preferences of 11 to 14 year old children were studied by employing a collection of photograph pairs related to two themes, environmental activities of children and landscapes. The photographs were taken randomly from a general stock of slides and were then chosen by an automatic process of recurrent test cycles and the systematic selection of those pairs most contributing to the detection of variation trends within the population.Child environmental attitudes changed noticeably in at least five different aspects after attending a fifteen day nature camp. No noticeable shift in preferences was found in a similar camp held, however, in a different area with a different team of educators. The most important dimensions of environmental preferences were strongly related to the environmental knowledge of each child and the improvement of such knowledge during the camp.The three authors are on the staff of the Department of Ecology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where Professor Fernando G. Bernáldez is the Department head.