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The visual appearance of the built environment provides navigational cues for travelers that might benefit the way-finding process. Therefore, when designing built environments it is important to consider how users will respond to the characteristics of the environment during way-finding. This study highlights the importance of travel mode in way-finding processes. We conducted an experiment where participants engaged in active and passive traveler modes were asked to navigate through a pre-defined study route on a university campus. We tested participants' visual memory for landmarks by presenting photographs on a computer screen in a scene recognition task. We also measured participants' eye movements to determine which features of the landmarks were encoded in memory. Our results show an interaction between travel mode and contextual landmarks used to recognize scenes from the visual environment. Specifically, active travelers show less reliance on buildings when recognizing visual scenes. The group of active travelers appeared to use non-building cues when recognizing scenes, suggesting that these aspects of the environment had been more strongly encoded in memory. Our results can help to inform inclusive design guidelines and strategies for designing buildings, open spaces, and computer-assisted guidance applications. Furthermore, this paper introduces and applies a novel method in urban design studies that can be used to measure way-finding performance, and to examine the interaction between visual cues and cognitive processes involved in this important task.
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