Spatial Contiguity

The spatial contiguity principle requires the words and corresponding pictures to be closely located. The idea is that the learner's visual attention need not be split between two distant sources of information. This is thought to enable easier integration of the visual and textual information. In the example above, the learner would need to go back and forth between the legend and the labelling in order to integrate the information thus unecessarily wasting valuable time and cognitive resources.