Designing context aware instructions: Perceptual salience and task demands in the selection of natural landmarks

The current study examines a small but important ingredient of adequate route directions (RDs): the selection of landmarks ("go left at the red building"). The starting point is a collection of RDs elicited in visual environments systematically differing in two characteristics which are easy to be detected by navigation software (path complexity and visual clutter). In this paper we focus on the set of landmarks produced by respondents in this experiment and analyze to what extent they can be predicted on the basis of their perceptual salience (as a function of size and pixel salience). We conclude that perceptual salience influences landmark choice only to a limited extent, other factors related to the specific navigation task play an important role, such as the location and stability of landmark objects.