Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
between day and night groups, which indicated that participants would use the
facades as landmarks differently for day than for night conditions. Winter
et al. ( 2005 ) also found that the participants ranked the criteria for the prominence
of facades differently between day and night conditions.
We know from experience that day and night appear differently when navigating
in relation to local and global landmarks. Darkness causes distant global landmarks
largely to disappear while it emphasises local landmarks at close distances as well
as all illuminated features. Presumably, this has an important effect on wayfinding
at night, because local and global landmarks play divergent roles when navigating
on the route. Local landmarks support route actions in vista space, whereas global
landmarks support the conceptualisation of environmental space and construction
of a cognitive map (Steck and Mallot 2000 ). Steck and Mallot ( 2000 ) created day-
(local and global landmarks), night- (local landmarks) and dawn-like (global
landmarks) conditions in a virtual street environment in which they investigated
human navigation strategies. The participants made turning decisions only slightly
worse in the night-like and dawn-like conditions, when only one type of landmark
was present, compared to day-like conditions. We hypothesise that in reality, both
day and night environments provide people with both local and global landmarks,
but these may be different for the two lighting conditions. A similar change of
navigation strategies between environments may be necessary, as observed in the
experiment of Steck and Mallot ( 2000 ): those participants who relied on only one
landmark type were readily able to start using the other landmark type if the
preferred type was not available.
The lack of ambient light and long-distance visibility makes night navigators
highly dependent on simultaneously available spatial information in personal
memory or technical navigation equipment, such as maps or navigators. Waller
et al. ( 1998 ) showed that blindfolded participants traversed an indoor maze signif-
icantly faster if they had a priori spatial knowledge from a map or virtual environ-
ment than those without prior knowledge. In addition, repetition did not make the
participants without prior spatial knowledge advance to the level of the participants
who had studied the maze initially. This implies that blindfolded navigation only
gave access to information on the closest spatial features and not even to the extent
of vista space. Presumably, the similar difficulty of constructing complete spatial
knowledge for unfamiliar environments also applies to limited light conditions even
when the perceptually accessible environment is larger.
Low-lighted night environments set challenges not only for wayfinding but also
for directing locomotion. Adams and Beaton ( 2000 ) showed that people become
significantly slower in approaching stairs and sharp turns in an urban environment
at night and at twilight than during the day. Nature as a locomotion environment is
full of obstacles of diverse sizes, which presumably slows down locomotion in a
similar manner at night. The insufficient support for visual perception presumably
also causes different landmarks to be observed at night than in day since the
perceptual salience (Caduff and Timpf 2008 ) of the landmarks changes. Cognitive
and contextual salience (Caduff and Timpf 2008 ) certainly also play their roles at
night, but these may not change much compared to the daytime.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search