"It's good to give them a head start by pointing them towards something they can find quickly, such as a landmark,” explained Micha Elsner for the hard of thinking.
"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,” added Dr Alasdair Clarke, just in case we’re still not clear.
The research was conducted using the Where's Wally? children's books (told you it was high brow). To find out which directions were clearest, volunteers were asked to focus on a particular human figure within the visually cluttered cartoons.
The volunteers were then instructed to explain, in their own words, how to find that figure quickly. As expected, the volunteers often opted to indicate the position of the human figure relative to a landmark object in the cartoon, such as a building.
“So 'Next to the horse is the man in red', is better than 'The man in red is next to the horse'," said Clarke.
The research could help 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. As if satnavs do not cause enough mayhem on the roads.
The research was published in the journal Frontiers In Psychology.
To get to the final frontier, turn left at the professor with the Where’s Wally book and don’t look back.
It’s been a bad week for ... finding the answer
Everyone likes to relax with a brainteaser over the festive season. Well, some people.
But Britain's top-secret organisation GCHQ has upped the ante with a cryptic Christmas card challenge and included a head-scratchingly difficult puzzle with their seasonal greetings.
This year spy agency director Robert Hannigan is sending out a complex grid-shading puzzle inside his traditional cards.
Those not on the card list can have a go on the GCHQ website.
Hannigan is asking players who complete all the stages to submit their answer to GCHQ by the end of January, with donations sought for the NSPCC.
Christmas cracking codebreakers will uncover an image in the grid that leads to a series of tougher challenges.
Pass the mince spies ...