Travel Time Cognition : Exploring the Impacts of Travel Information Provision Strategies

Speed and accuracy of comprehension and mental workload are known as the main factors identifying the most proper strategies of traveler information dissemination. The role of ‘cognition’, however, has been neglected in literature; especially, the duration of various types of traveler information persistence in the memory and the quality they are recalled. This paper discusses two main themes. First, it uncovers which types of information, visual, aural, or textual have more influence on travelers’ cognition. Second, by combining the data, it checks whether the visual-then-aural qualitative data could carry a better meaning of the traffic environment in the mind of the traveler or the reverse mode (aural-then-visual). Laboratory experiments, each comprising two different levels of complexity were conducted on 150 subjects. Data was collected at a university traffic laboratory using artificial transportation networks with a fixed-base route choice system. The results show that the complexity, quantity, and type of information influences travelers’ cognition. It is statistically shown that by increasing the level of complexity of the networks, the differences between information become more pronounced. Travelers, who are separately provided with visual, aural, and textual information, have significantly different recall ability. Visual color-coded information was found to have the strongest effect on travelers’ recall ability. Visual-then-aural format of information delivery is shown to be more effective than aural-then-visual configuration. This study denotes that the interpretation of the aural data becomes easier when visual qualitative information is provided beforehand