# Exploring the Use of Landmarks to Aid Pedestrian Wayfinding
## 3 Method  
### Participants  
Thirty participants of non-visual communication professions/tertiary courses (15 females and 15 males) were recruited via an online classified advertising website and Facebook. Participants were aged 18-50 years (M = 28.3 years, SD = 8.99); all were proficient in English, and all were unfamiliar with the geographical test region. Participants were tested in individual sessions taking approximately one hour, not including travel time to the study's starting point. At the end, they were paid AUD 40 each in department store gift cards and excused. This study included three phases with three groups. In Phase 1, participants in two of the three groups were asked to walk the same pre-set route--which was the fastest route through the region as determined by Google Maps. Due to the fact that one group had been shown photographs of the conspicuous landmarks along the route (the Landmark [LM] Group) as shown in Figure 3, the route-following task was deemed easier for that group than for the group who relied on Google Maps (the GM Group), whose task was also to follow the pre-set route. Hypothesis 1 therefore predicted that the LM Group would outperform the GM Group by making fewer wayfinding errors and fewer hesitations. As participants in the paper map group (the PM Group) were to choose their own route, their task differed from that of the two other groups. Therefore, their data were excluded from the analysis of this task. This latter group was included to see what route they would take to the destination and if this route would be similar to the (pre-set) fastest route as computed by Google Maps--as used by the LM and GM Groups. The time to travel the route was not considered in this study as the researchers thought that accuracy in navigation--not taking wrong turns and being able to find your way if a wrong turn was taken--was more important than travel speed.  
In Phase 2, participants in the LM and GM groups were asked to draw the route on an unlabeled paper map. Because it was reasonable to expect participants in the LM Group to primarily focus on the landmarks, this should negatively affect their ability to draw the route on an unlabeled paper map compared with participants in the GM Group. Accordingly, hypothesis 2 predicted that the route drawn by the GM Group would be more  
Figure 3: Two distinctively designed buildings used on the route as landmarks by the LM Group.  
accurate than the route drawn by participants in the LM Group. As the PM Group drew their own routes, their data were again excluded from the analysis in this phase.  
In Phase 3, all participants were asked to place all the landmarks encountered on an unlabeled paper map of the region. Assuming that participants in the LM Group would attend more landmarks than participants in the GM and PM Groups, hypothesis 3 predicted that the LM Group participants would locate more landmarks correctly than the GM Group and the PM Group, who walked their own routes. The likelihood of noticing the on-route landmarks was clearly higher than that of noticing distant off-route landmarks (often used for orientation and creating a cognitive map of the region). Accordingly, hypothesis 4 predicted that all three participant groups would locate more on-route landmarks than off-route landmarks. Finally, as the LM Group's navigation aid had implicitly encouraged them to focus on landmarks in Phase 1, hypothesis 5 predicted that the LM Group would locate more off-route landmarks correctly than the participants in both the GM and the PM Groups. Table 1 below summarizes the hypotheses of this study.