The secret of giving good directions: Scientists find order of words is critical - and say you should always start with a landmark and end with the destination
- Participants explained how to find Waldo in books
- When mentioned a noticeable landmark, listeners found him
- 'Landmark-target-second' worked if the target strongly stood out
- Results can develop computer algorithms for automatic direction-giving
- Another study reveals men have better sense of direction than women
How you order your words may be the key to giving good directions.
A new study finds that starting with a noticeable landmark, then ending it with the destination will make it easier for others to understand your directions.
Researchers used the children's book, 'Where's Waldo?' to come to this conclusion.
Researchers say how you order your words may be the secret to giving good directions. The best way is to begin with a landmark and end it with the destination.
The School of Psychology at the University of Aberdeen showed participants an image from the book and asked them to explain how to find the man wearing strips among a sea of people and other things.
When participants mentioned a notifiable nearby landmark, listeners needed less time to find Waldo, than another other description.
'Here 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',' says Alasdair Clarke the lead author of the study.
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The experiment also showed that depending on how the landmark looked participants changed the order they mentioned it.
For example, landmarks that stood out strongly from the background were statistically likely to be mentioned at the beginning of the sentence.
But if the target figure itself stood out strongly, most participants mentioned that first.
In a separate experiment, researchers noted that the most frequently use word order was 'landmark-target-second', which is just as effective.
Listeners who were guided to Waldo with this word order needed on average less time than those who heard it in the reverse order.
'Listeners start processing the directions before they're finished, so it's good to give them a head start by pointing them towards something they can find quickly, such as a landmark,' coauthor and linguistics professor at Ohio State University, Micha Elsner.
Researchers believe these result can help develop computer algorithms for automatic direction-giving.
'A long-term goal is to build a computer direction-giver that could automatically detect objects of interest in the scene and select the landmarks that would work best for human listeners,' says Clarke.
Another study conducted this month suggests men have a better sense of direction than women
Researchers from Norway scanned the brains of volunteers as they completed navigation tasks to discover men are more adept at finding their way because they use a separate part of their brain..
Using 3D goggles and a joystick, a total of 36 participants - 18 men and 18 women - had to orient themselves in a large virtual maze while functional images of their brains were continuously recorded.
Men use cardinal directions - the use of north, south, east and west - during navigation to a greater degree. Women use landmarks and points of reference. The study shows cardinal directions are more efficient because they're more flexible. Destinations can be reached faster because it depends less on where you start
In the MRI scanner, they were given 30 seconds for each of the 45 navigation tasks. One of the tasks, for example, was to 'find the yellow car' from different starting points.
The men solved 50 per cent more of the tasks than the women.
According to lead researcher Dr Carl Pintzka from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), women and men have different navigational strategies.
Men use cardinal directions – the use of north, south, east and west - during navigation to a greater degree.
'Men's sense of direction was more effective. They quite simply got to their destination faster,' he said.
'If they're going to the Student Society building in Trondheim, for example, men usually go in the general direction where it's located,' Dr Pintzka explained.
'Women usually orient themselves along a route to get there, for example, 'go past the hairdresser and then up the street and turn right after the store.''
The study shows that using cardinal directions is more efficient because it is a more flexible strategy.
The destination can be reached faster because the strategy depends less on where you start.
Images of the brain showed that both men and women use large areas of the brain when they navigate, but some areas were different.
The men used the hippocampus more, whereas women used their frontal areas to a greater extent.
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