Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
knowledge gained and address the limitations of the study. Finally, we state our
conclusions and suggest future directions of research (section “Conclusions and
Future Work”).
Background and Motivation
People inherently employ physical features or objects in the environment in order to
structure in their minds the routes that they move on. These objects or
landmarks
constitute a fundamental basis for
cognitive maps
encoded and processed in mem-
ory (Tolman
1948
). Landmarks are used to describe the environment or routes to
others, to analyse the properties of the environment, to plan routes and to navigate
along routes in the environment (Presson and Montello
1988
). People form land-
mark ontologies that are used for thinking spatially and for creating external spatial
representations, such as maps and navigation applications (Smith and Mark
2001
).
The landmark ontologies in the spatial thinking vary according to the application
domain, the aim of the task and the conditions of use (Winter et al.
2005
; Snowdon
and Kray
2009
; Kettunen et al.
2013
). In order to understand and support such
multifaceted spatial perception and memory for navigation, the landmarks must be
studied in different kinds of scenarios.
In spatial cognition research, the term “landmark” has many meanings. Lynch
(
1960
) found landmarks to be one of the basic elements that people utilise for
spatially perceiving a city environment, defining them as particular external refer-
ence points for wayfinders. Since then, the term landmark has been commonly used
to refer to a particularly prominent feature in the environment. However, while
studying the characteristics of landmarks, researchers have often adopted the
broader meaning of a landmark as any feature in the environment to which spatial
thinking refers (e.g., Presson and Montello
1988
; Denis
1997
; Brosset et al.
2008
;
Caduff and Timpf
2008
; Rehrl et al.
2009
). We employ this broader meaning in the
present study because our motivation of wayfinding support requires the consider-
ation of not only the most prominent global landmarks but also local landmarks that
are often less prominent in nature.
Most of the empirical landmark research conducted so far has been restricted to
urban environments and daytime conditions (e.g., Denis
1997
; Rehrl et al.
2009
).
Nature sets particular challenges for wayfinding due to the difficulties in estimating
travelled distances because of landmarks that are easily confused due to their
resemblance (e.g., Cohen et al.
1978
; Okabe et al.
1986
). The changing vegetation
and conditions also challenge a wayfinder, as shown in studies on novice nature
hikers (Kaplan
1976
), orienteers (Omodei and McLennan
1994
), rescue cases (Heth
and Cornell
1998
) and experienced, but lost wayfinders (Whitaker and Cuqlock-
Knopp
1992
; Hill
2013
). The night time makes the wayfinding challenges even
more apparent and sets further difficulties mostly related to visibility in terrain
(Kumagai and Tack
2005
). In the present article, we investigate the weakly studied
role of lighting in the perception and recall of landmarks in nature.
