I think this is a bad example. The bus is clearly a simplified representation. If the answer/explanation given was actually correct then you'd also expect the bus to have other details like side view mirrors.

Or because kids are very familiar with busses and adults are not.

Interestingly I got it instantly but I’ve used busses far more in my adult life than as a child

Why would kids be more familiar with busses than adults?

> Why are [large vehicles] so exciting to a kid? Perhaps it is obvious: they are loud, big, fast, complex, powerful. There is the element of danger. Adaptively, there must be a survival advantage for children who are curious about loud, large, fast beings and objects.

https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry...

I don’t see the correlation, sorry!

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.

School buses are a staple of childhood, at least in the US.

Yeah, this bus is clearly intended to be a school bus but it’s missing too much detail. If the absence of the door is a valid clue, then so is the absence of the big red stop sign that is on the non-door-side.

Lay off the copium - busses don’t have red stop signs everywhere (for example they don’t have them here)

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.

https://www.theredbus.co.uk/blog/platform-sharing

they also always have mirrors, which is the first thing an adult would probably look for (since it applies more universally to vehicles)

Big red stop sign? Like on the bus?

Isn't this exactly the point? You look at this the analytical way, decide the bus doesn't have enough detail to be a realistic representation and stop there, maybe looking around for other clues. A very good example imo.

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.

I don't think the point is to nitpick how realistic the representation is or how fair the question is. The point is children react to the question differently from the way adults do. And that's true despite (or perhaps because of) what an adult thinks of the question.

But that's a different point to what GP was making. It wasn't that children answer differently to adults, it's that they get it 'right' more often than adults. Which is still more about ignorance allowing them to make the same assumptions as the questioner than thought processes. A child might not even be aware that people in other countries might drive on the other side of the road, and so be sure of their 'correct' answer, but most adults know that without knowing the location of this image, the question can't be answered.

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.

That bus example is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen.

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.

The rationale they provide is that you can't see the door to the bus. So we are looking at the driver's side of the bus. Ignore "Which was is the bus going?" and instead ask "Which side is the front of the bus?"

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.

Oh is that supposed to be the rationale?

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.

I think you've just confirmed the post's point about overanalysis. This type of thinking is exactly why adults get it right less often than children.

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.

But there is a difference in the picture. You'd also determine that it's going left when looking at the windshields, as only the left side is completely straight.

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.

The right windshield is straight as well, you see part of a building behind it

I meant the small indention below the windshield that's only on the right side. The black line from the window ends slightly further out then the chassis of the bus

Indeed, my assumption was that this was some simplified drawing of a bus that didn't have doors in the first place

The bus is missing many details of a real bus, so it's clearly an abstraction that leaves out detail, meaning that it's reasonable to assume the artist may have crudely left out doors from the picture. This doesn't make the kids "right".

I tried to find some source for this, but could not trace it back further than a YouTube video from 2016 [1], which is very light on details, to say the least.

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.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVKR4A8a4lw

I think in the US kids use buses (school buses) at a higher rate than adults. The bus in the image is also colored yellow, just like school buses. Perhaps it has more to do with kids just having more recent experiences solving the same problem in real life?

Huh, it seems to me that realizing buses have doors on the side adjacent to the edge of the road is more an example of crystallized intelligence than fluid.

I'm not sure I think this illustrates different types of intelligences.

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.

I actually did have trouble with that bus image. However it’s not as though adults make this trade-off for no gain.

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.