To answer the increasing mobility, it is necessary to use more and more symbolic information. To respond to the safety necessity, this information also needs to be as clear and as quickly understood as possible by the whole population, especially on the road where the time constraint is more important. Then, as an immediate source of information, pictograms are increasingly important in our environment. There are numerous advantages in using symbolic messages compared to written ones, as they are understood without involving language. The legibility distance is also higher than for written messages. Nevertheless, even if, in some cases, the pictogram design has to fit into normalisation constraints, not all of them are equally recognised by the population. The understanding of a pictogram is not always given by the symbolic representation itself. To convey complex information, it is sometimes necessary to combine several elements or codes in the same pictogram. In some cases, these associations might lead to misunderstanding or ambiguity. Some of these combinations have been tested in two experiments, in order to elaborate some guidelines, and a comparison of pictogram understanding has been made between young and older people. (A)
Samenvatting