Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What skills does "Where's Waldo?" draw on?

Just curious. DD encountered one of these books for the first time last week and found Waldo in every picture almost instantly. I think it took her no more than 5-10 minutes to go through the whole book. She may be a little old for the series, I think, but still. What is this skill? I'm interested in part because she actually got a very average score on an IQ subtest where you find the missing thing in a picture. ???

"Where's Waldo?" is based almost entirely on having good ocular motor control, visual attention, and visual processing. If you can scan smoothly without getting distracted, and process what you see quickly, you can find Waldo pretty easily.

Finding what is missing in a picture is a very different skill from recognizing what is already there.

"Finding what is missing in a picture is a very different skill from recognizing what is already there."

I was pondering this myself and trying to decide how similar the skills are. What do you think finding the missing thing measures? It seems to me it's also visual attention, but "something" else as well.

One description of the Picture Completion subtest on the WISC:

Picture Completion: Requires recognition of the missing part in pictures. Measures visual perception, long-term visual memory, and the ability to differentiate essential from inessential details.

I'd say that "Where's Waldo?" mostly relies on visual perception, and doesn't really put high demands on the other two areas.

When my DD had her OT assessment at 7yrs the OT said to us afterwards "I can tell from these results that she's great at Where's Wally but can't read". So it's not even as simple as visual perception, but one particular part of visual perception that works well, a child may still have a weakness in other areas of visual perception (which my DD does/did).

Oh, that's so interesting! I geek out on all this stuff. DD reads extremely well, for whatever it's worth.

I still almost wonder if the scorer flipped some of her subtest results. She scored very high on spatial skills (at least, I think that's it--the Odd One Out portion of the RIAS) but then 58th% on What's Missing, the other nonverbal section. I would have previously bet good money that she would be pretty damn average on spatial skills.

Yes, MOT, "Where's Waldo?" is relying primarily on the Figure-Ground discrimination aspect of visual processing.