Bulldozers and Spatial Cognition
Suppose you want to take a picture of yourself laying down in the mud in front of a bulldozer. What side should the bulldozer be on when you take the picture?
Does the directionality of a person’s primary writing system (left-to-right, top-to-bottom for English) affect the way in which they take in other compositions, such as a photo or painting, creating a “perceptual directionality”? If so, should visual composition be informed by knowledge of the target audience’s perception directionality? After a brief search I came up with this paper, which seems to indicate that I’m not too far off the mark.
Writing Direction Influences Spatial Cognition
Now that doesn’t exactly answer the original question, although it does inform the decision of how to compose the shot.
Originally published at BeyondLogical.net/blog. Please leave any comments there.