Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgments
This research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through the second author’s ordinary grant, and the Geothink.ca project. We would like to thank Hélène Crépeau from the Mathematics and Statistics Department of Laval University for her help in the computation of the logit model in SAS. We also sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. They helped us to significantly improve this paper. We finally thank the Ministère de l’Energie et des Ressources Naturelles of the Quebec Province, and the Surveying and Cartography Department of Quebec City for the geographic data used for the 3D analyses.
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Quesnot, T., Roche, S. (2015). Quantifying the Significance of Semantic Landmarks in Familiar and Unfamiliar Environments. In: Fabrikant, S., Raubal, M., Bertolotto, M., Davies, C., Freundschuh, S., Bell, S. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9368. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23374-1_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23374-1_22
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