An experimental study of some effects of figure-ground contrast on the use of street maps

Nine different formats of a street map were designed to test effects of contrast between city blocks, streets and street names. The position of the streets and their names remained constant. The contrast between city blocks, streets and names was varied by using combinations of black, white and grey in the designs. Four different map reading tasks were used to test each of the nine formats: 288 undergraduate students were tested on the 36 combinations of format and task. Λ two-way analysis of variance was conducted. The means were analysed using Tukey's HSD test. Both factors were found to be significant at the 0.01 level, indicating that variations in the formats significantly influenced performance on the various map-reading tasks.