Quantifying the Significance of Semantic Landmarks in Familiar and Unfamiliar Environments

摘要

During navigation, people tend to associate objects that have outstanding characteristics to useful landmarks. The landmarkness is usually divided into three categories of salience: the visual, the structural, and the semantic. Actually, the roles of visual and structural landmarks have been widely explored at the expense of the semantic salience. Thus, we investigated its significance compared to the two others through an exploratory experiment conducted on the Internet. Specifically, 63 participants were asked to select landmarks along 30 intersections located in Quebec City. Participants were split by gender and familiarity with the study area. Unsurprisingly, the results show that unlike strangers, locals tended to focus on highly semantic landmarks. In addition, we found that women were more influenced by the structural salience than men. Finally, our findings suggest that the side where travelers move compared to the road impacts on the landmark selection process.