2026-08-14 · data

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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.

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.

The reason we find it hard to give good directions is because of the 'curse of knowledge'.

We don't just want people to walk a mile in our shoes, we assume they already know the route.

Once we know the way to a place we don't need directions, and descriptions like 'it's the left about halfway along' or 'the one with the little red door' seem to make full and complete sense.

The curse of knowledge isn't a surprising flaw in our mental machinery – really it is just a side effect of our basic alienation from each other.

We all have different thoughts and beliefs, and we have no special access to each other's minds.

A lot of the time we can fake understanding by mentally simulating what we'd want in someone else's position.

We have thoughts along the lines of 'I'd like it if there was one bagel left in the morning' and therefore conclude 'so I won't eat all the bagels before my wife gets up in the morning'.

This shortcut allows us to appear considerate, without doing any deep thought about what other people really know and want.

'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.