# Exploring the Use of Landmarks to Aid Pedestrian Wayfinding
## 5 Discussion
The observation that the LM Group also located landmarks on a map that did not indicate the route per se suggests that those participants acquired more than sheer route knowledge, namely an initial level of survey knowledge. This supports the contention that landmark knowledge also contributes to the development of survey knowledge. It is tempting to interpret the observation that the LM Group both recalled more on-route landmarks and were able to place more of these correctly than participants in the other two groups that they had engaged in active encoding of landmark information while walking the route. As they were shown the landmarks again in Phase 2, the results equally suggest it was a case of cued recall. It is interesting to note that there was some evidence of a primacy effect but not a recent effect on the performance of the GM Group. One way to account for that could be because their navigation tool did not include images of landmarks. Attention would therefore most likely have been focused on following the map-based route correctly. At the start of the route, some GM Group participants were observed visually matching their maps to the environment, with the first couple of nearby on-route landmarks likely noticed. Once progress was satisfactory, participants could trust the map without paying attention to the surroundings. Regarding the PM Group, as many of these participants generally walked routes away from the main route, the on-route landmarks found along this route were not noticed. The eight off-route landmarks were all visible in the region, but relatively few of these were correctly located on the maps. It is perhaps not surprising that the four off-route landmarks situated nearest to the main route were also those located correctly most often. They were situated 100-150 m from the route, while three of the other four were highly noticeable tall office towers, and another, less noticeable large building, was situated between approximately 300 and 500 m from the route. This suggests that the further a landmark is located from a given path/route, the less likely it will be detected and subsequently recalled. The refuted hypothesis 5 claimed that because explicit attention was drawn to landmarks, the LM Group would locate more off-route landmarks than the other groups. One possibility is that the route was so simple and the on-route landmarks so obvious that the LM participants had no need to attend to off-route landmarks. Had the route been more complicated, perhaps participants would have needed to rely more on orientation to help them maintain their bearings and understand the space they were traveling through. This is when off-route landmarks may have been noticed as they aid orientation. As indicated by their mean SBSOD scores, all participant groups rated themselves around average in regard to their perceived environmental spatial abilities. Overall, the scale is most closely related to tasks that involve movement through environmental space where spatial updating is necessary. Research in which correlations have been found has typically involved orientation/direction pointing, route estimation tasks, and only sometimes route-following, as conducted here. Studies reporting correlations between the SBSOD scale and mobile maps in the outdoor wayfinding context are still very scarce. To the best of the authors knowledge, no research has been published in regard to wayfinding solely with sequential images of properly classified landmarks and the SBSOD scale as used by the LM Group here. As Phase 1 directly involved spatial updating, a correlation was predicted in this phase, in particular with the paper map condition given the paucity of correlations with mobile maps. However, the fact that no correlation was observed in that phase suggests that accurately assessing one's own spatial ability may not be a straightforward task. The route may also have been too easy to follow to truly test participants' spatial abilities.