A study on visual and structural characteristics of landmarks and experts’ and non-experts’ evaluations

Yesiltepe, Demet and Conroy-Dalton, Ruth and Ozbil Torun, Ayse and Coutrot, Antoine and Hornberger, Michael and Spiers, Hugo (2020) A study on visual and structural characteristics of landmarks and experts’ and non-experts’ evaluations. In: Spatial Cognition XII : 12th International Conference, Spatial Cognition 2020, Riga, Latvia, August 26–28, 2020, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science . Springer Verlag, LVA, pp. 95-107. ISBN 9783030579821

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Abstract

The aim of this study is to understand what makes a landmark more salient and explore if the assessments vary between experts and non-experts. We hypothesize that non-experts’ saliency judgments will be in conformity with those of experts. Secondly, we argue that not only visual characteristics but also structural characteristics make landmarks salient and size and visibility of objects are important for them to be considered as salient. To test our hypotheses, an online navigation game, Sea Hero Quest (SHQ), was used and two levels of the game were selected as the case study. The characteristics of these levels were evaluated by experts in the field and by non-experts. Our results suggest that both visual and structural characteristics of landmarks make them more salient. We also discovered that experts’ saliency evaluations are mostly consistent with non-experts’.