Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and choose similar kinds of landmarks to draw in sketch maps of routes, indepen-
dent of the conditions. Naturally, route-like sketch maps come to contain the route
as the frame of the map, but there seems to be more in the observed similarity. A
likely explanation for this phenomenon is that people apply common ontologies of
landmarks while drawing sketch maps. This impression is supported by a qualita-
tive observation from the present study that during the map drawing, several
participants thought aloud about many landmark concepts belonging to the “Land
cover” and “Landforms” landmark groups but still did not draw these features.
Commonly used maps probably play an important role in people
'
s conceptions of
landmark sets that should be used when drawing sketch maps. In the present study,
the applied landmark ontologies may have been importantly based on the land-
marks that are typically presented on topographic maps.
In addition to the preconceptions that the participants seemed to have on what to
draw on sketch maps, the differences in the frequencies of landmarks between the
thinking aloud during route traversal and sketch maps were partly related to the
characteristics of the two media. Most of the participants drew sketch maps based
on the course of the route, which caused a surplus of passage landmarks compared
to the thinking aloud during route traversal, even if the passage under foot was
mentioned often also during the route traversal. On the other hand, salient features
belonging to the “Trees and parts of trees” and “Rocks” landmark groups were
repeatedly mentioned during the route traversal, which played a role for the
significance.
The rest of the significant differences between the tasks most probably account
for salience aspects. Structures were probably more noted in the sketch maps due to
their visual salience (Caduff and Timpf
2008
), for which reason they were readily
recalled while drawing. The visual salience potentially explains at least part of the
significantly lower degree of use for trees and parts of trees in the sketch maps, also
known from our previous study (Kettunen et al.
2013
): such common nature
features were not effectively recalled even if many distinguishable instances were
mentioned during the route traversal. In the case of signs, which were significantly
less used in the sketch maps than had been expected, the cognitive salience (Caduff
and Timpf
2008
) may have played a role: people may have mentally merged the
constantly observed sign landmarks as self-evident parts of the route that they drew
on the maps as passage landmarks.
The discrepancy between the results obtained using the thinking-aloud protocol
and those obtained using sketch maps is a central finding of the study and appar-
ently caused by the nature of the tasks. Thinking aloud is an online task that
reflected what the participants perceived and found important to mention. In
contrast, the sketch maps reflected memory performance and they emphasise the
most memorisable features on which the participants used to construct their spatial
representation of the environment and that they would use later to find their way or
to describe the route. The result that the memory performance does not differ
between night and day conditions, although the online perception measure does,
suggests that the absolute importance of different landmark groups is similar for the
