article_snippet: A new study suggests tall rooms (stock image pictured) encourage people to explore space as well as think freely, as previously discovered .
article_snippet: When choosing the perfect house, many people opt for high ceilings and a sense of space, despite premium price tags and the higher cost of heating airy expanses in the winter.
article_snippet: Now a new study suggests that tall rooms excite the brain and encourage people to explore space, building on previous research that high ceilings are linked to a sense of freedom.
article_snippet: A psychologist thinks that the combination of a room that promotes free thinking and is stimulating to the senses, explains why people choose airy homes.
article_snippet: On the one hand, rooms [with high ceilings] promote visuospatial exploration, while at the same time they prompt us to think more freely.
article_snippet: This suggests that high ceilings capture people
article_snippet: In 2007, another study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, revealed that the height of ceilings affects how people think.
article_snippet: Marketing experts Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu modified the height of ceilings in rooms to study how participants responded.
article_snippet: Marketing experts Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu discovered that high ceilings seem to cause people to think more freely, encouraging creativity and abstraction, while lower ceilings promoted confined thinking.
article_snippet: However, when the words related to feelings of entrapment, like ‘restricted’, the findings were reversed and those in the more confined space out performed those in the room with the higher ceiling.
article_snippet: Dr Vartanian said: ‘Knowing that people's preference for rooms with higher ceilings might be driven by the ability of those spaces to promote visuospatial exploration helps partly explain why people opt to live in such spaces, despite the fact that people cost more to purchase and maintain.
highlights_snippet: Study found high ceilings stimulate the senses and explore space .
  
highlights_snippet: Previous research has shown high ceilings encourage creative thinking .
  
highlights_snippet: Findings may explain why people are willing to pay more for airy homes .