Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Perception and Recall of Landmarks
for Personal Navigation in Nature at Night
Versus Day
Pyry Kettunen, Katja Putto, Val´rie Gyselinck, Christina M. Krause,
and L. Tiina Sarjakoski
Introduction
People usually find wayfinding at night in nature challenging due to limited lighting
and difficulty of identifying landmarks. Supporting wayfinding in such demanding
conditions with landmark-based route directions, maps or navigators would be very
useful for many wayfinders (see Rehrl et al.
2010
). The present study empirically
identifies landmarks that people easily perceive in typical night conditions in nature
and that could thus be prioritised for giving real-time route directions in these
conditions. We also study the recall of landmarks and compare the results of
perception and recall in the day and night conditions in order to identify the need
of adaptation in route directions between the times of day.
We begin with the background of our research and review previous research
related to limited lighting conditions and landmarks (section “Introduction”). Next,
we describe the experiments performed in order to study the landmarks in nature
during the day and at night, and present the conducted analysis (section
“Methods”). We briefly discuss the results (section “Results”) and then move to
general discussion (section “Discussion”) where we present a synthesis of the
