Research published by Frontiers in Psychology found that to give people directions they are likely to remember, it is not enough to give the correct details – they must also be said in the right order in a sentence, reports EurekAlert!
Sentences that start with a memorable landmark and end with the object of interest are more likely to be recalled, than the reverse.
“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’,” said lead author Alasdair Clarke, of the University of Aberdeen.
Volunteers who participated in the study were asked to focus on an image of a particular person within the deliberately cluttered pictures in the ‘Where’s Wally?’ children’s books. They then had to explain how they found the person most quickly in the cartoon.
The volunteers often indicated the position of the person relative to a landmark.
Landmarks which stood out strongly against the background of the scene were more likely to be mentioned at the start of the sentence, while those which stood out less were mentioned at the end of the sentence.
If the figure itself stood out strongly, participants mentioned that first.
The report concluded: “Speakers keep mental track of which objects in the scene are easier or harder to perceive.
“They use this information to preferentially select easier-to-see objects as landmarks, and they treat easier- and harder-to-see landmarks differently when planning the syntax of their descriptions.”
Micha Elsner, of the Ohio State University, added: “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,”
“But if the target your listener is looking for is itself easy to see, then you should start your directions with that.”
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