The following research plan is a natural continuation of the study
conducted at Liverpool John Moores University and in collaboration with Liverpool Hope University set out in the seventh chapter. In particular, it is intended to investigate more the narrative mechanism underlying the perception of the environment in a way that is compatible with the assumptions of Neurotourism, which, as explained in the second chapter,
represents a “young” discipline with goals of bringing together the newest technologies of investigation of neural correlates and the role of the tourist understood in a behavioral sense. The novelty of the study exhibited here lies in being the first attempt to application of brain stimulation in the specific field of research: if, in fact, there are studies with neuroimaging and/or neurophysiological techniques for the erception of landscapes urban and nonurban landscapes (Ma et al., 2014), for distinguishing judgments about static or dynamic or, in general, for evaluating a destination by means of images ,the use of brain stimulation techniques is not revealed, used instead for aesthetic or artwork judgments, as in the case of the study with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) by Fiori and collaborators (2020) for the measurement of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) induced through stimulation of the motor cortex primary motor cortex, or the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research conducted by Di Dio and
collaborators (2016) regarding the perception of landscape images: in particular, the latter study detected a sensorimotor mechanism even in the presence of stimuli of static landscapes, calling into play the premotor cortex.
The study was conducted through the administration of an online questionnaire, in Italian, on the Google Forms platform; the compilation required the observation of 5 pairs of photographs characterized by the presence or absence of people in what is represented, and by 1 pair whose difference is provided by the presence or absence of a boat (Figure 1). The choice to include a pair with a different variable has the dual
objective of providing a means of control and supporting the eventual confirmation of the starting hypothesis.
The same set of visual stimuli from the first procedure was also used for a
pilot study conducted through an eye-tracking technique, in which 11
(mean age = 27.27 ± 9.19) adult female participants recruited
separately from the first procedure, again joining the study voluntarily and after viewing an informed consent; in addition to the inclusion criteria of the first task, they were required not to wear eyeglasses during eye tracking, to avoid detection errors by the software. Eye movement was detected through Gaze Recorder , an eye-tracking webcam that does not require the use of sensors, serving only and exclusively the video camera of the computer used by the participant.