I wonder if the ability diminishes in adults, or if adults are more inhibited and worried about looking foolish. Try the same experiment with adults after drinking alcohol!
My cod-biological explanation is that a child's brain is still forming connections and the process of becoming an adult involves pruning many of these connections to become more focused and efficient.
You might be associating orange with Friday because it makes you think of the sun and going outdoors?
It's all very interesting. Even more so because I don't think of days/colours. My mind gives the days size and mass. ie. starting with Sunday (I'm American) the day is small. And as the week progresses the days get larger, heavier and denser. Until Saturday, which is a big fat puffy ball of "day". You can do what you want with it and it will just be there and be your friend. I love Saturdays.
Nature abhors a vacuum, but it loves a rainbow.
It's a fun little memory trick, and it was surprising to learn that it's not a universal experience. Not just "your letter-color association is different from mine" (it seems to be highly personal) but "wait, you don't do that at all?"
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-way-bus-going-why-adult...
Spoilers: adults prune information for more efficient processing and in doing so lose information
Edit: I hate to dwell on this too much, but even if a door and mirrors were visible, the bus could be in reverse. This seems to be more of a case of accidentally picking the intended answer due to a lack of knowledge. (Of levels of abstraction in representation and of vehicle design.) That said, I don't necessarily disagree with the underlying point being made.
https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry...
I’d expect an adult to be more familiar with a bus by virtue of having taken the bus more often than a child. Whether or not that’s exciting or just a mundane commute shouldn’t affect familiarity.
But they always have doors…
The other day someone pointed at the open platform of RM1353 and asked me: did you take the doors off this bus? “No, it was built that way.” She looked amazed, and pleased.
Sure, the bus could be in reverse, but it could also be a British bus driving in the US. Or we could be looking at a reflection of the bus. Or we could be looking at the reflection of a British bus going in reverse. This is not about determining the direction with 100% certainty. This is about having a clue at all which you can justify, which adults mostly don't.
EDIT: And if the question weren't ambiguous, you'd basically be telling people the answer, since as soon as you say "assume it's in the US", you give a massive clue that bilateral asymmetry is relevant.
Spoiler follows:
The solution is supposedly that in countries where you drive on the right-hand side of the road, children immediately deduce that the bus is traveling to the left.
This seems nonsensical to me because it's not even clear the bus is on a road, or it it is, that it's on the far side of the road. As far as I can tell, the bus is in a dirt field. Or if it's a dirt road, there clearly seems to be enough space for another bus to pass behind it.
And since there are no citations, I actually don't even believe it. I've seen enough completely made-up statistics on LinkedIn blogs that unless there's a link to a study, at this point I assume the authors are just making sh*t up.
And, knowing that we are looking at the driver's side because of the absence of doors, the answer depends on which side of the road the bus is designed to be driven on.
I mean I can't even tell. Because no bus looks the way the bus in the image looks.
I've never in my life seen a bus where the windshield was the same size and shape as the back window. Never in my life seen a bus that didn't have brake lights or turn signals. And so forth.
In other words, there are so many things wrong with the "bus" that I don't know why you'd assume that if the "artist" had drawn it from the other side they would have bothered to include a door.
Kids immediately recognize the view must be from the driver's side of the bus because they're not examining the situation. They're taking the first piece of relevant information and rolling with it. No door means passengers get on the other side, so it's going whatever way you assume traffic across the street should go based on where you live.
Honestly, this image is a terrible example to illustrate their point. I think it's more likely that children are more likely to actually use public transit, which is why they'd be able to detect the missing door quickly.
This kind of "research" does not really warrant the amount of inspirational blog posts that has resulted from it. In fact, as an adult I tend to reject 80% of these stories as nonsense.
For me, looking at the image, I have to suspend disbelief about a lot of things. This is a very simplified picture of a bus, lots of elements are missing/unrealistic, so I have to try to determine what missing things are part of the puzzle and which things are just coincidence. I think children would not be able to suspend their disbelief as quickly, and will instead immediately map the image to the real world object. They don't notice that the back bumper and the front bumper are identical (which they shouldn't be) or that the back window and the front window are identical (which they shouldn't be). So looking at this image, I decided "ok so this isn't meant to be a real bus, it's some sort of puzzle, so let me look for clues about it's direction of motion."
That first part, "this isn't meant to be a real bus", is the piece that causes the difference, I believe. It's that thinking that makes it difficult to think "well what's on the other side of the bus?", because who knows, this bus doesn't have real world bumpers who knows if it has real world doors. As an adult, we can abstract and reason about a theoretical bus that might not have doors, whereas I think a child would connect that to the concrete bus and have difficulty abstracting.
Ask a 6-year old to spot a bird in a tree a hundred feet away and they’ll be looking around everywhere for it simply because they don’t know what they’re looking for. An adult knows exactly what to look for: a dark shape in the branches moving separately from the motion of the branches in the wind behind it, briefly silhouetted against the sky while those same branches move, probably 30 ft or higher off the ground (depending on the size of the tree, of course). You probably even know instinctively what size of thing you’re looking for based on your knowledge of the apparent angular size of a bird at a given distance you’re also instinctively able to estimate.
The concept that the only ‘wrong’ thing to do is to do nothing is a real important thing to internalize as an adult - not always where professional work is concerned, but nearly always where artistic pursuits are concerned. You’re doing it ‘right’ if you’re doing it.