Sentences that start with a prominent landmark and end with the object of interest work better than sentences where this order is reversed while giving directions, a study has found.
Sentences that start with a prominent landmark and end with the object of interest work better than sentences where this order is reversed while giving directions, a study has found.
Researchers at the University of Aberdeen in UK said that to give good directions, it is not enough to say the right things — saying them in the right order is also important.
They asked volunteers to focus on a particular human figure within the visually cluttered cartoons of the Where’s Wally children’s books.
The volunteers were then instructed to explain, in their own words, how to find that figure quickly - no trivial task, as each cartoon contained hundreds of items. The volunteers often opted to indicate the position of the human figure relative to a landmark object in the cartoon, such as a building.
The participants tended to use a different word order depending on the visual properties of the landmark. Landmarks that stood out strongly from the background — as measured with imaging software — were statistically likely to be mentioned at the beginning of the sentence, while landmarks that stood out little were typically mentioned at its end.
In a separate experiment, the researchers showed that the most frequently used word order, “landmark first-target-second”, is also the most effective — people who heard descriptions with this order needed on average less time to find the human figure in the cartoon than people who heard descriptions with the reverse order.
