A new study carried out by a group of psychologists and linguists from the University of Aberdeen, the University of Edinburgh, and Ohio State University suggests that the order of words is of prime importance while giving directions to a person.

According to the study, a better word order determines how well the second person understands the instructions, and there are better chances for the listener to find the object of interest is you start with a major landmark and finish with the target object.

Researchers suggest the results of the study could have applications in the fields of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.

"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'." explained Dr. Alasdair Clarke, a Research Fellow from the University of Aberdeen's School of Psychology, and also the lead author of the study.

In this study, a group of volunteers were asked to focus on a specific human figure within the visually cluttered cartoons. These cartoons were taken from 'Where's Wally?' children's books and showed crowds of people. The character of Wally is known as Waldo in North America, Willy in Norway, Walter in Germany, Charlie in France, Effi in Israel, Holger in Denmark, and Wally in the UK.

The volunteers were asked to explain how Wally can be found quickly. The researchers observed that the volunteers described Wally's position relative to some landmark object, such as a big tree, building, or a statue, however, a different word order was used to describe the direction, depending on the visual properties of the landmark. It was also observed that if a landmark stood out strongly from the background, it was usually pointed out at the beginning of the phrase. If target figure was more prominent, it was mentioned before the landmark object.

Researchers then carried out another set of experiment in which they demonstrated that the order - 'landmark-first-target-second' - was the most effective for the listener to find target object. Telling the directions in reverse order, that is, 'target-first-landmark-second', resulted in listener taking longer to find the object of interest.

"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 just start your directions with that." said Micha Elsner, Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University, and the co-author of this study.

According to researchers, the results of the study could also help in developing 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." Dr. Clarke said.

The results of the study have been published in the academic journal Frontiers in Psychology.