Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Some studies have addressed useful types of landmarks in nature during the day.
Whitaker and Cuqlock-Knopp (
1992
) interviewed orienteers and military scouts for
their particular memories of navigation experiences in their personal history and
analysed the named landmarks. Man-made cues were mentioned the most fre-
quently due to their particularity in the environment, then elevations as marked
by contours and next, water and vegetation landmarks. Brosset et al. (
2008
) found
orienteers in nature refer more often to linear features than in urban settings. Rehrl
and Leitinger (
2008
) observed that landform-related landmarks dominate the nav-
igation expressions used when ski touring. Snowdon and Kray
'
s(
2009
) question-
naire revealed that people consider peaks and water courses as the most typical
landmarks in nature, with woods, rocks and lakes being less important.
Montello et al. (
1994
) as well as Pick et al. (
1995
) observed the reading of
elevation contours by experienced map users in hilly terrains and found that the
users often relied on hills and large valleys (Pick et al.
1995
) as well as in flat areas
(Montello et al.
1994
) that were easily distinguishable on the map. Montello
et al. (
1994
) also investigated features recalled from landscape photographs and
reported terrain and vegetation features as clearly the most referred to. In contrast,
atmospheric, geological or other features were rare in the collected sketch maps and
protocols.
Sarjakoski et al. (
2012
) and Kettunen et al. (
2013
) studied the differences in
human landmark use in nature between seasons. The participants walked through a
route in a national park while thinking aloud about the prominent features around.
They perceived structure and passage landmarks most readily, followed by trees,
waters, land cover, rocks, signs and landforms (Sarjakoski et al.
2012
). Overall, it
must be noted that the landmarks highlighted in all the cited studies above reflect to
some extent the types of terrain in the experiments.
The aim of this study is to achieve new knowledge of the role of lighting in the
perception and recall of landmarks in nature. The final goal of our research is to
gather information about the need of adaptation for the employed landmark sets in
navigation applications according to the seasonal and time of day conditions. We
hypothesise that ontologies used for describing landmarks in nature differ from
those in urban environments and that the importance of different landmark catego-
ries varies with the time of day conditions.
Methods
We studied the effect of night on the perception and recall of landmarks in nature
trail experiments in which we brought groups of participants to hike in a forested
national park area both in day and night. In this section, we describe the set-up and
analysis of the experiments.
