Traveler information provision strategies (visual, aural, textual, or multimodal) and their effects on the cognition of time

The purpose of this paper is to discover which types of the information, visual, aural, and textual, which are currently given to travelers in Tehran, the capital of Iran, have moreinfluence on travelers’ cognition. We also step into the realm of the mixture (multimodal) format of the data. Different laboratory experiments, each comprising two different levels ofcomplexity are designed. The result shows that the context of choices is the determinant oftravelers’ cognition. It is statistically proved that, in the less complex environment, the differences between the effects of the three different types of information (visual, aural, andtextual) on cognition and recall ability are not significant; however, by increasing the number of links and nodes of the networks, which leads to the greater amounts of information, the differences are more pronounced. Travelers, who are separately provided with visual, aural, and textual information, have significantly different abilities in bringing the memory of the experiences into their mind. Furthermore, different sequences of visual and aural information in a multimodal information provision strategy affect the travel time recall quality differently. The visual-then-aural qualitative data is more influential on the cognition than the aural-then-visual.

Keywords:

Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS) , Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) , Cognitive psychology , Visual , aural , textual , and multimodal information , Experimental psychology , Travel time cognition