Abstract Landmarks, salient spatial elements, are often argued to play an important role in the formation of mental representations of space. They are likely to be perceived due to their salience and they can be used as spatial reference points to memorize the locations of other spatial elements. In maps, landmarks are often represented as pictograms. Similar to real world objects, their likelihood to be perceived and used as spatial reference points depends on salience characteristics. In this paper, we investigate the structural salience of landmark pictograms in maps, based on their location relative to a task-relevant object. Using eye tracking, we aimed to identify distance parameters that predict the structural salience of landmark pictograms in an object location memory task. Additionally, we investigated whether the availability of structurally salient landmark pictograms improves object location memory. Our results show that landmark pictograms close to a to-be-learned object and the cardinal axes of the to-be-learned object were fixated more often. However, only the distance to the to-be-learned object was found to be related to object location memory performance. An increased location memory performance was observed when landmark pictograms were available close to the to-be-learned object. We argue that proximity of a landmark pictogram to a task-relevant object location and its cardinal axes can be used as parameters for its structural salience. We also found some first evidence that the availability of structurally salient landmark pictograms may improve object location memory performance.

中文翻译：

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地图中地标象形图的结构显着性作为对象位置记忆性能的预测器

摘要 地标是显着的空间元素，经常被认为在空间心理表征的形成中起着重要作用。由于它们的显着性，它们很可能被感知，并且它们可以用作空间参考点来记忆其他空间元素的位置。在地图中，地标通常表示为象形图。与现实世界对象类似，它们被感知并用作空间参考点的可能性取决于显着性特征。在本文中，我们研究了地图中地标象形图的结构显着性，基于它们相对于任务相关对象的位置。使用眼动追踪，我们的目标是识别距离参数，这些参数可以预测对象位置记忆任务中地标象形图的结构显着性。此外，我们调查了结构显着地标象形图的可用性是否可以改善对象位置记忆。我们的结果表明，靠近待学习对象的标志性象形图和待学习对象的基轴被更频繁地固定。然而，发现只有与待学习对象的距离与对象位置记忆性能有关。当靠近待学习对象的标志性象形图可用时，观察到位置记忆性能增加。我们认为地标象形图与任务相关对象位置及其基轴的接近度可以用作其结构显着性的参数。我们还发现了一些初步证据，表明结构上显着的地标象形图的可用性可能会提高对象位置记忆性能。