Rural public spaces are crucial to the daily activities of older adults; however, limited research has examined the effects of their environmental characteristics on older adults’ spatiotemporal behavior and perception from a multisensory perspective. This study hypothesizes that composite sensory environments have significant nonlinear predictive effects on older adults’ behavior types and satisfaction. In this study, 10 sample spaces were selected in Qingdao, China. Multi-source data were collected through a two-week period of unobtrusive observation and subjective questionnaire surveys (N = 241). Multiple logistic regression was used to analyze the main effects of environmental characteristics, and an MLP model with a single hidden layer of 100 units was constructed to predict dwell time and satisfaction. The results show that, in the investigated rural context, older adults’ dominant behavior was social activity (81.12%), which mainly occurred in built spaces such as squares. Multiple logistic regression indicated that, among the various environmental factors, visual aesthetics had a statistically significant effect on behavior types (p = 0.013). The MLP model achieved prediction accuracies of 85.3% for dwell time and 93.1% for satisfaction. The key predictive variables were volume perception (100% importance), the Natural Sound Index (NSI) (92.1%), and visual aesthetics (89.3%). Subgroup heterogeneity analysis further showed that older-old adults and those with poorer health conditions were more sensitive to pavement quality and physical comfort, whereas older adults living alone or with limited household companionship were more strongly influenced by visual aesthetics and natural soundscape quality. The theoretical significance of this study lies in proposing quantitative measures of natural sound and odor indices and revealing that, in the specific northern rural built environment, the coordinated design of visual and auditory environments plays an important role in improving spatial quality. The findings provide empirical support for the age-friendly micro-renewal of rural public spaces in specific regions. However, due to the limitations of single-season data and a relatively small sample size, their generalizability needs to be further verified across regions.
Fu et al. (Sat,) studied this question.