It looks like researchers have discovered just how people remember directions – and this happens when something is located near a landmark, with the landmark being mentioned first. Just how did this conclusion come about? Well, a new study arrived at that conclusion in a new study which required participants to select people in a Where’s Wally? cartoon. This research was published by Frontiers in Psychology, where it seems that people are likely to remember the directions given with the landmark mentioned first, although one must take note that these directions should also be given out in the right order in a sentence.
Lead author Alasdair Clarke, of the University of Aberdeen, shared, “We show for the first time that people are quicker to find a hard-to-see person in an image when the directions mention a prominent landmark first, as in ‘next to the horse is the man in red’, rather than last, as in ‘the man in red is next to the horse’.”
Volunteers who took part in this study were required to focus on an image of a particular person within the cluttered pictures in the ‘Where’s Wally?’ children’s books, before proceeding to explain the method in which they found the person in the fastest time possible within the cartoon. The most common answer was the position of the person relative to a landmark.
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