**4. Discussion and conclusion**

The research findings confirm the results of previous studies (e.g. [19]) that the majority of school students do not possess sufficient knowledge about the meaning of protected areas in nature. Some confuse them with city parks and other areas that are clearly not established for the purpose of nature conservation. When describing human activities in protected areas, mainly prohibited ones were highlighted, like "no littering", "no smoking", "no polluting", "no access with cars and motorbikes", "no disturbing of animals", and so on. This shows that students do not have a clear idea what they should do in protected areas, what are desirable behaviours and actions and how they can benefit (cognitively, physically or emotionally) from being active in protected areas. They primarily see protected areas as places distant from their everyday lives and consequently distant from their mind and awareness. Ferreira [18] and Ali [26] pointed out some deficiencies in conservational communication and education.

The main aim of this research was to highlight the importance of proper conservational communication with park visitors (in this case with primary school students) through using visual messages. A variety of external representations, like pictograms, graphs, maps, and so on, is available to support students' understanding of concepts and processes [34]. Our findings show that big majority of students the meaning of pictograms displayed in protected areas. However, only a selection of pictograms was tested for understanding. Therefore, further studies are needed to investigate this issue. Research findings have also confirmed the main research question that students faced only with a set of positive pictograms perceived protected areas as areas where a number of human activities are acceptable, but they also at the same time knew which human activities were unacceptable in the park. Similar results were obtained for students faced with a comic strip. On the other hand, those faced only with a set of negative pictograms tended to be more preoccupied with listing unacceptable human activities and were able to list significantly fewer acceptable human activities in the park. These findings confirm that rules visualized with pictograms, which communicate to students expected behaviours instead of prohibitions, influence positively on students' perception of behaviours and actions in the park. These findings are in line with PBIS framework and results of experimental studies, like Hardman and Smith [31] and Kostewicz et al. [32], that focused on positively designed school rules, which influenced positively on students' school behaviour.

To conclude, findings show that the design of information boards with pictograms or comic strips can greatly influence how a primary school student perceives a particular protected area, which is something park managers need to keep in mind when designing the information boards or in personal communication to visitors. Our next research will focus on young adults to test if they perceive the issues similarly to children.
