Aesthetic response to an interpretive trail is important to both its recreational and educational functions. It was predicted from the empirically established relationship between information rate and pleasure that user pleasure would peak in a segment of trail just past a major change in the trail environment (discontinuity). The hypothesis is supported by the results of an experiment in which the rate of travel, an approach behavior, was used to measure pleasurable resonse. Rate of travel through the trail segment immediately following the discontinuity was significantly slower than the rate of travel through the subsequent segment and through the segment preceding the discontinuity.
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