Investigation of the relationships between thermal, acoustic, illuminous environments and human perceptions

To explore the relationships between thermal, acoustic, luminous environments and human perceptions, i.e., individual factor comforts, individual factor satisfactions, and the overall satisfaction, this investigation conducted a controlled laboratory test with 216 different environmental conditions. The main, crossed, and interaction effects of multiple environmental factors on individual factor perceptions were investigated first, and the results indicated ranges for the neutral temperature, sound level and illuminance. It implied that temperature had crossed effect on acoustic and visual comfort, and both sound level and illuminance had crossed effect on thermal comfort. In addition, thermal, acoustic and visual comfort were also affected by the temperature × illuminance interaction. Subsequently, it was discovered that the individual factor satisfactions showed a one-vote veto tendency but not an absolute veto power over the overall satisfaction. The effect of acoustic satisfaction on overall satisfaction was the greatest, followed by thermal satisfaction and visual satisfaction. This study also classified the environmental conditions under typical overall environmental acceptable rates and quantified the relationships between human comforts and human satisfactions by using the conditional probability. This method implied that machine learning and probability theory, which have seldom been used in this field of research, could be alternative analytical methods in the future.