大学生旅游地图空间符号认知的群体差异研究——基于眼动实验数据分析

Differences in College Students' Spatial Symbol Cognition of Tourism Map:Based on Experimental Data from an Eye-movement Tracking System

旅游地图中的符号系统通过形状、色彩等视觉变量传递旅游信息,提供旅游服务,其表现形式可分为形象符号和抽象符号。文章采用认知心理学眼动追踪技术,以不同符号表现形式的导游图作为实验材料,研究大学生游客群体差异和符号形式对地图符号空间认知的影响。结论显示:不同的地图符号形式影响差异显著,形象符号地图的空间认知显著优于抽象符号;旅游地图使用频率高者的空间符号认知显著优于偶尔使用者,且差异在抽象符号中表现更明显。性别、专业背景、学科背景的差异均对地图符号的空间认知产生一定影响。

Tourism maps are one of the most crucial items used by tourists in their cognition and application of spatial geographic information. The symbol system used by tourism maps communicates information to tourists about tourism services using shapes, colors, and other visual variables. However,the design principles of traditional maps are not suitable for tourism maps. The tourism map symbol system needs to improve the expressive force of the map. Symbols can be divided into two types： visual and abstract. However, which type can ensure better cognitive effects for users？ A new research method, eye-movement study, will help answer this question and provide a new perspective and reliable basis for tourism map design. Spatial cognition methods have been developed from comparatively lowlevel visual perception tasks to higher- level cognitive tasks. These methods include psychophysical methods, eye- movement tracking, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and combinations of these methods. Eye- movement tracking technology is one of the effective visual information- processing research methods and can accurately reflect recognition features, cognitive strategies, and psychological feelings. As an important research method for studying human psychological activity,eye- movement tracking is applied in many fields, such as reading and advertising. However, eyemovement tracking has been applied rarely in the tourism field. Specialized eye-movement studies for tourism maps are still lacking and need to be performed. This research is devoted to investigating the influence of group difference and different symbol types on map learning using eye-movement tracking technology. Using college students as the research object, our study explores the effect of spatial cognition map factors within this group. The purpose of this paper is to provide theoretical guidance for tourism map design. This experiment used a 2 × 2 mixed experimental design, in which independent variables include group difference and types of map symbols, and dependent variables are fixation duration and fixation count. Data were analyzed by comparing means, paired t- test, and repeated measures analyses of variance. Our research drew some conclusions as follows：（1） Subjects had better performance in the tourism map- positioning task using a tourism map with visual symbols than when using a tourism map with abstract symbols. The differences in eye- movement data using the different tourism map forms are significant. The findings show that tourism maps with visual symbols have better cognitive effects.（2） Females show better performance than males in terms of fixation count.However, there was no significant discrepancy between males and females in terms of fixation duration.（3） High- frequency tourism map users also had better performance than low- frequency tourism map users. This performance difference is more obvious when using tourism maps with abstract symbols.（4） Differences in the college students＇ disciplines and majors also influenced their spatial cognition. The different disciplines and majors had a significant interaction with tourist map symbol types. Overall, better cognitive effects were obtained when students used tourism maps with visual symbols. Gender, frequency of use, discipline, and major also show differences in spatial cognitive effects. Therefore, tourism map design should fully consider visitor group differences and tourism attraction features to publish a variety of user-friendly tourist maps for each type of user.