Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Experimental Set-Up
Participants
Our experiment included 22 participants (10 men and 12 women) who were evenly
distributed into the day (5 men and 6 women) and night (5 men and 6 women)
condition groups. The participants were 19-68 years old (median 42 years). None
of them reported that they had walked the nature trail used in the experiment before
and seven reported to have previously visited the area. During the experiments, we
noted no prior spatial knowledge, such as recognition of places or scenery, that
would have caused bias in the results. The participants were rewarded for their
participation with travel costs and two recreation tickets.
In the background questionnaire, we asked if the participants were bilingual
(McLeay
2003
) and how often they used to visit nature and utilise common types of
maps (range of 0-4: never, less often, monthly, weekly, daily). Only one of the
participants was bilingual, so no bias by bilingualism is assumed to occur in the
results. The participants averaged monthly nature visits (mean 2.2) and used maps
on a weekly to monthly basis (mean of maximums of map type use values by a
participant, 2.7). They had used city maps most (mean 2.6), followed by road maps
(1.8), terrain maps (1.4) and, much less frequently, orienteering maps (0.7). Statis-
tical tests did not highlight differences between the day and night groups in these
measures (
W
0.19 in the two-tailed Wilcoxon rank sum test).
The participants filled in the Santa Barbara Sense-of-Direction Scale (SBSOD)
questionnaire, which is a self-report measure designed for assessing spatial abilities
in the environmental scale (Hegarty et al.
2002
). The SBSOD form was translated
as part of the study. Based on this measure, the day (median score 70, mean 66.18)
and night groups (median score 60, mean 67.73) had no difference in the spatio-
cognitive abilities (
W
79.5,
p
<
>
56,
p
0.79 in the two-tailed Wilcoxon rank sum test).
¼
¼
Environment
The route of the experiment followed a marked nature trail on footpaths and
outdoor tracks that go around a low brook valley in woods. In this article, we call
the environment “nature” because it is dominated by wild natural growth, such as
spruce and birch trees, with only some roads and constructions along the route.
There was a significant difference between the two routes. The first route followed a
lakeshore, crossed a road and a river along a dam and contained no steep slopes.
The second route followed an outdoor track and ran over a forested hill with
considerably steep slopes and cliffs. The terrain conditions were considerably wet
during the whole experiment because the preceding summer had been very rainy,
and the footpaths were muddy and slippery.
