The Influence Of Text Layout And Amount Of Information Of Urban Guide Sign On Road Network Space Representation

Guide sign as one of the six classes of traffic signs, it is mainly used for transfer roaddirection, location and distance information. The tic-tac-toe mesh structure of city roadsdetermines its complex and various information at cross roads. Such guide sign mainly conveyinformation for text space layout, thus its usability level of text layout directly affects the roadusers choose right and wrong, and how quickly. At present, guide sign text layout at home andabroad are mainly horizontal layout, this can lead to the wrong understanding of route and pathrelationship.Previous research are stay at the perceptual level to study the influence of physicalparameters such as text font and size, the amount of information of road name to visualinterpretation performance, but not in-depth the understanding level of path space relationshipfor users. The role of guide sign is based on user’s understanding of information panel,especially the road space relationship. Previous related research of the amount of informationon panel only for the number of road under the condition of horizontal layout, and ignored thethe influence of text layout to the acceptable level of information.Considering the particularity of Chinese characters and the long-term history ofvertical layout, whether vertical layout can improve user’s understanding of path spacerelationship and road network global knowledge representation based on less affect visualrecognition performance? Meanwhile,whether the vertical layout can also improve theacceptable the amount of information of roads. The two problems need further research.The visual recognition performance of text layout, the layout and a reasonable amount ofinformation of urban guide sign were researched in the study, determined the better layout and areasonable amount of information of urban guide sign。In this study there were three parts:In study1, performance differences between text layout were determined by two tasks ofsearching and understanding, and if the visual recognition performance differences variesbecause of the word were discussed, provided the basis for the possibility of Chinese vertical layout.In study2and study3, the influence of text layout and amount of information of urban guidesign on road network space representation were discussed, path judgment(path trend judgmentand path relation were included in path judgment) as well as the global knowledge networkjudgment were included in road network space representation.In study2, the influence of the layout and amount of information of urban guide sign to thejudgment of path trend and path relation were studied.In study3, the influence of the layout and amount of information of urban guide sign to theformation of global knowledge network were studied.The main conclusion showed as follows:1.The influence of layout on visual recognition performance varies because of the Englishand Chinese, the English performance differences between various horizontal layout and verticallayout bigger than the Chinese performance differences between various horizontal layout and verticallayout, Chinese layout have a higher flexibility.2.There is a significant influence of text layout of urban guide sign on road network spacerepresentation, the performance of vertical layout on guide sign were better than the performanceof horizontal layout on guide sign.3.There is no significant influence of amount of information on the formation of roadnetwork space representation. The determination of the amount of information affected by roadlayout, and the amount of information that under the vertical layout more than horizontal layout,if necessary it is can be increased by six to nine under the vertical layout.Based on the above research，we suggest that using vertical layout as the urban guidesign layout and keep one road on both of the sides, but also can use vertical layout and keep tworoads on both of the sides in sometime.