Abstract
The aims of this study were to investigate whether visual impression of sea area may be correlated to navigation officers' performance on lookout and to conduct basic research to clarify which elements of scenery influence visual impressions. In this study, the authors carried out an experiment on the navigation bridge in the routine course of navigation and examined visual impressions of sea areas by Semantic Differential Method in four different circumstances. Principal component analysis was applied to the data, four principal aspects of subjects' evaluation were found: “comfort”, “difficulty”, “tediousness”, and “activity”. As results, in the narrow area with heavy traffic, the scores of “difficulty” were higher and the scores of “tediousness” were lower than in the other areas. The scores of “activity” were higher in the area with high winds and large waves than in other areas. It was also found that the scores of “comfort” were low in the area with heavy traffic or with heavy weather. These results suggest that visual impression is greatly affected by the amount of information required for safe navigation, and it is difficult to obtain good situation awareness in a sea area where there is a significant volume of information to be absorbed.
