Understanding Cognitive Saliency by Using an Online Game

One of the most common definitions of saliency suggests that there are three categories for landmark saliency, these being visual, structural and cognitive [1]. A large number of studies have focused on the afore-mentioned categories; however, there appear to be fewer studies on cognitive saliency than on the other two types of landmark saliency. Hence, in this study, our goal is to better understand the cognitive saliency of potential landmarks. For this purpose, we used an online virtual game, Sea Hero Quest (SHQ), and asked people to watch videos of the game. In the videos, a boat navigates through a waterway/river environment and finds goal locations one by one. People then were asked to answer questions, which aimed to measure their cognitive saliency. Our results suggest that cognitive saliency is closely related to visual and structural saliency in unfamiliar environments.

[1]  P G Jackson,et al.  In search of better route guidance instructions. , 1998, Ergonomics.

[2]  Hanspeter A. Mallot,et al.  The Role of Global and Local Landmarks in Virtual Environment Navigation , 2000, Presence Teleoperators Virtual Environ..

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

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

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

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

[7]  M. Denis,et al.  Spatial discourse and navigation: an analysis of route directions in the city of Venice , 1999 .

[8]  M. Denis,et al.  The production of route directions: investigating conditions that favour conciseness in spatial discourse , 2004 .

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

[10]  T. Gärling,et al.  The effects of pathway configuration, landmarks and stress on environmental cognition , 1984 .

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

[12]  Chin-Teng Lin,et al.  Gender differences in wayfinding in virtual environments with global or local landmarks , 2012 .

[13]  Stéphane Roche,et al.  Quantifying the Significance of Semantic Landmarks in Familiar and Unfamiliar Environments , 2015, COSIT.

[14]  M. Denis.  The description of routes : A cognitive approach to the production of spatial discourse , 1997 .

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

[16]  T. Tenbrink.  Cognitive Discourse Analysis: accessing cognitive representations and processes through language data* , 2014, Language and Cognition.

[17]  Ekaterina P. Volkova,et al.  The effect of landmark and body-based sensory information on route knowledge , 2011, Memory & cognition.

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

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

[20]  Jakub Krukar,et al.  Walk, Look, Remember: The Influence of the Gallery’s Spatial Layout on Human Memory for an Art Exhibition , 2014, Behavioral sciences.

[21]  Sabine Timpf,et al.  Personal Dimensions of Landmarks , 2017, AGILE Conf..

[22]  Antoine Coutrot,et al.  Usage of Landmarks in Virtual Environments for Wayfinding: Research on the influence of global landmarks , 2019 .

[23]  Rebecca Albrecht,et al.  Memory for Salient Landmarks: Empirical Findings and a Cognitive Model , 2018, Spatial Cognition.

[24]  Gerhard Krieger,et al.  Investigation of a sensorimotor system for saccadic scene analysis: an integrated approach , 1998 .

[25]  David Kortenkamp,et al.  Prototypes, Location, and Associative Networks (PLAN): Towards a Unified Theory of Cognitive Mapping , 1995, Cogn. Sci..

[26]  Kathy Pezdek,et al.  Cognitive Maps and Urban Form , 1982 .

[27]  Giuliano Carlo Geminiani,et al.  Spatial navigation in large-scale virtual environments: Gender differences in survey tasks , 2008, Comput. Hum. Behav..

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

[29]  Thora Tenbrink,et al.  The Language of Architectural Diagrams , 2019, COSIT.

[30]  L. Itti.  Author address: , 1999 .

[31]  L. Carlson,et al.  Selecting landmarks in novel environments , 2011, Psychonomic bulletin & review.