A Research on Pedestrian’s Short-term Memory Characteristics of Subway Guide Signs

The research on the guidance signs of the metro system and the formulation of the sign setting strategy can effectively improve the pedestrian traffic efficiency and the sustainability of the transportation sector. Based on the theory of cognitive science, this paper collects some pictures of subway signs in Chinese cities as materials, and randomly selects pedestrians for short-term memory (STM) tests. After analyzing the test results, the influences of pedestrian basic characteristics on the STM capacity of various types of guiding signs and the law of STM capacity decay with time were obtained. Among the basic characteristics of pedestrians, gender has no significant effect on STM capacity, but age and education level have significant effects on it: the STM capacity of the pedestrians over 50 years old was significantly lower than that of the subjects under 50 years old. After reaching a certain level of education (high school education), the STM capacity of the subjects was higher and showed a stable state. In addition, the STM capacity decay function of pedestrians on different information-oriented signs is obtained by regression analysis of the STM-time decay curves of pedestrians with different information content.