Quantifying the Significance of Semantic Landmarks in Familiar and Unfamiliar Environments

During navigation, people tend to associate objects that have outstanding characteristics to useful landmarks. The landmarkness is usually divided into three categories of salience: the visual, the structural, and the semantic. Actually, the roles of visual and structural landmarks have been widely explored at the expense of the semantic salience. Thus, we investigated its significance compared to the two others through an exploratory experiment conducted on the Internet. Specifically, 63 participants were asked to select landmarks along 30 intersections located in Quebec City. Participants were split by gender and familiarity with the study area. Unsurprisingly, the results show that unlike strangers, locals tended to focus on highly semantic landmarks. In addition, we found that women were more influenced by the structural salience than men. Finally, our findings suggest that the side where travelers move compared to the road impacts on the landmark selection process.

[1]  Stephan Winter,et al.  Including landmarks in routing instructions , 2010, J. Locat. Based Serv..

[2]  Stephan Winter,et al.  Enriching Wayfinding Instructions with Local Landmarks , 2002, GIScience.

[3]  Michel Denis,et al.  Referring to Landmark or Street Information in Route Directions: What Difference Does It Make? , 2003, COSIT.

[4]  Stephen C. Hirtle,et al.  The Nature of Landmarks for Real and Electronic Spaces , 1999, COSIT.

[5]  Birgit Elias,et al.  Extracting Landmarks with Data Mining Methods , 2003, COSIT.

[6]  Stephan Winter,et al.  Structural Salience of Landmarks for Route Directions , 2005, COSIT.

[7]  Markus Knauff,et al.  The structural salience of landmarks: results from an on-line study and a virtual environment experiment , 2012 .

[8]  Michel Denis,et al.  When and Why Are Visual Landmarks Used in Giving Directions? , 2001, COSIT.

[9]  Thora Tenbrink,et al.  The Impact of Dimensionality on Natural Language Route Directions in Unconstrained Dialogue , 2010, SIGDIAL Conference.

[10]  A. Cameron,et al.  Microeconometrics: Methods and Applications , 2005 .

[11]  Stéphane Roche,et al.  Platial or Locational Data? Toward the Characterization of Social Location Sharing , 2015, 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[12]  Stephan Winter,et al.  Route Adaptive Selection of Salient Features , 2003, COSIT.

[13]  Stephan Winter,et al.  Selection of Salient Features for Route Directions , 2004, Spatial Cogn. Comput..

[14]  M. Goodchild,et al.  Prospects for VGI Research and the Emerging Fourth Paradigm , 2013 .

[15]  M. Goodchild.  Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography , 2007 .

[16]  Sabine Timpf,et al.  On the assessment of landmark salience for human navigation , 2007, Cognitive Processing.

[17]  K. Mengersen,et al.  Wayfinding: A simple concept, a complex process , 2012 .

[18]  Clare Davies,et al.  Spaces or Scenes: Map-based Orientation in Urban Environments , 2010, Spatial Cogn. Comput..

[19]  Michel Denis,et al.  Testing the Value of Route Directions Through Navigational Performance , 2003, Spatial Cogn. Comput..

[20]  K. Hamburger,et al.  The Role of Landmark Modality and Familiarity in Human Wayfinding , 2014 .

[21]  A. Siegel,et al.  The development of spatial representations of large-scale environments. , 1975, Advances in child development and behavior.

[22]  Daniel R. Montello,et al.  Elements of Good Route Directions in Familiar and Unfamiliar Environments , 1999, COSIT.

[23]  Stéphane Roche,et al.  Measure of Landmark Semantic Salience through Geosocial Data Streams , 2014, ISPRS Int. J. Geo Inf..

[24]  Jon M. Kleinberg,et al.  Mapping the world's photos , 2009, WWW '09.

[25]  Kevin Lynch,et al.  The Image of the City , 1960 .

[26]  Katsumi Tanaka,et al.  Landmark Extraction: A Web Mining Approach , 2005, COSIT.

[27]  M. Raubal,et al.  Focalizing measures of salience for wayfinding , 2005 .