Mayer’s 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning
The Spatial Contiguity Principle - Group Related Information
The Spatial Contiguity Principle is about the actual space in between your text and visuals on the screen, stating that humans learn best when relevant text and visuals are physically close together.People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near to each other rather than far from each other on the page or screen. Presenting graphics followed by explanatory text further down the screen forces the user to scroll up to see the graphic & scroll down to see the text. This physically separates the text and graphic. Related text and graphics should be presented together.
How to use the Spatial Contiguity Principle:
This one makes sense intuitively. You should keep all related text and graphics physically close together in your frame. This makes it much easier for learners to process the information, using less energy to decipher meaning. This principle is pretty straight forward. Make it easy for your audience to know where to look for information.
Consider the following example:
In the example above, the bones of the skull are labelled using a legend, with descriptions off to the side of the image. Numbers are used to link the areas identified with the names. This divides learners’ attention and should be avoided.
In this example, labels are provided on top of the graphic, which makes it easier to focus on the content.
See HERE for further examples