To guide pedestrians to navigate in a strange city and reduce the cognitive overload suffered when walking, thermal change direction, vibration stimulation direction, intensity variation and body location are employed to construct four-parameter compound tactons.They are mapped to four different types of navigation message： route attribute, intersection type, distance and heading direction. One psychological experiment was conducted. The derived confusion matrices were used to investigate recognition rates and information transfer for compound tactons,and non-parameter tests were employed to analyze the effect of each parameter on the number of correct responses.Experimental results show that the overall identification rate for four-parameter tactons is 88.72% by using different tactile parameters,and 19.64 icons can be identified reliably in all 32 tactile icons according to the information transfer value. Thermal changes can be an effective supplement to vibrotactile icons. This suggests that compound tactons will be a promising method of conveying complex information when navigating in a virtual or real urban environment.
