Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Procedure
Test sessions began with participants filling in the consent form, background
questionnaire and the SBSOD form. Next, the experimenter instructed the partic-
ipants on the thinking-aloud method (Ericsson and Simon
1998
) and gave them the
first of the two route traversal assignments on a written form: “Walk a route with the
experimenter and memorise the route so that you are able to
walk through it again
without guidance.
The experimenter walks after you and guides when necessary.”
The experimenter asked the participants to think aloud their observations along the
route while performing the task. Before the actual task, the participants practised
thinking aloud while walking to the beginning of the route (150 m, 2-3 min). The
first route traversal task ran on a 650 m long route and lasted for 11-19 min, after
which the experimenter interrupted the task and gave another written assignment,
modified from the previous one: “. . . memorise the route so that you are able to
describe it to another person who is to walk through the same route
” The second
part of the route was also 650 m long and took 8-16 min. After the second part, the
experimenter asked participants to tell whether they found any difference between
the two tasks during the traversal. We gave the two different task assignments for
the thinking-aloud tasks in order to investigate if memorising for oneself or to
another person would change the manner of thinking aloud. We made all the
participants complete the tasks in the same order so that they focused similarly
on the same parts of the routes and the contents of the collected data were
comparable. Finally, the participants walked back to the starting point of the session
guided by the experimenter, still memorising but without thinking aloud (150 m, 3-
5 min).
At night, the participants wore a 900-lumen LED headlamp that provides a
bright and targeted view up to several dozens of metres in an open area. This
kind of lighting condition is typical to night-time activities in nature, in which
similar light sources are typically used. In both day and night, the participants
carried an audio recorder for saving the thinking-aloud recordings. The experi-
menters recorded video of the participants while walking after them.
After the route walkthrough, the participants had a break for 15 min in order to
ensure that the short-term memory would not affect the recall tasks. The next task
was to draw a sketch map on a blank paper according to a written assignment:
“Draw the route you walked and explain your markings thinking aloud”. We set no
time restrictions for drawing, and it took 2-22 min for the participants to complete.
We recorded the drawing both in audio and video.
...
Analysis
By landmarks, we mean all permanent and distinguishable features in the environ-
ment that participants noted during the tasks (as in, e.g., Denis
1997
; Rehrl
