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experiments (Kettunen et al.
2013
). The study concentrated on the perception
of landmarks along a route using a thinking-aloud task, and on the recall of
landmarks afterwards using a sketch map task. According to the results, the
perceived landmark types differed between day and night due to the absence
of ambient light and the visual focus on the spotlight of the headlamp at night.
Similar factors have been previously observed to affect the wayfinding with
night vision goggles (Kumagai and Tack
2005
; Gauthier et al.
2008
). How-
ever, the recall of landmarks did not differ according to the sketch maps: the
drawn landmark groups remained similarly frequent between day and night.
The participants
prior ontologies about the important landmarks on maps
appeared to influence the sketch map drawing, as many well-recalled land-
marks were observed to be left consciously undrawn. Significant differences
in the use amounts of landmark groups between the tasks further confirmed
these conclusions.
The found feature-specific particularities in the perception of landmarks at
night in nature can be applied to the development of adaptation of real-time
navigation applications, such as maps or navigators. Such adaptation to time
of day would better support the navigation in nature not only during the day
but also at night, which is essential for many round-the-clock activities. In
particular, water landmarks should be avoided in nightly route directions,
whereas salient point-like landmarks, such as rocks, can be more helpful at
night than during the day. In addition, the study highlighted illuminated
features to be particularly perceptible as distant landmarks at night. However,
their use for route directions must be carefully considered concerning their
impermanence and homogeneity.
The analysis presented above may be further extended in the future,
particularly regarding the study of landmark recall according to the sketch
maps, which showed no differences between day and night. Further study of
the sketch maps in regard to the omitted landmarks, spatial correctness and
individual landmark types might reveal differences between the spatial recall
at day and at night. Further synthesising investigation would also be benefi-
cial, considering our previous study between seasons (Kettunen et al.
2013
)
together with the present study. In general, confirming studies on the use of
landmarks in nature at night would be important. The use of more exact
behavioural methods than the ones in the present study, such as mobile
eye-tracking, could be considered. Moreover, there is still a lack of compre-
hensive night navigation studies in real urban environments.
'
Acknowledgements This survey is part of the research project “Ubiquitous Spatial Communi-
cation” (UbiMap) in 2009-2012. The UbiMap project was funded by the Academy of Finland
(MOTIVE programme) and was carried out in cooperation with the Finnish Geodetic Institute
(FGI), Department of Geoinformatics and Cartography and the University of Helsinki, Cognitive
Science. The third-party funding sources did not affect the design or conduct of the study. The
authors want to thank all the participants for taking part in the study.
