I can't remember what is the word for those funny light spots created when you take a mirror or any reflecting surface and make a spot of light that can be moved all over the room, walls, etc. Does anyone know?
Learn English – the word for the reflected sun light
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I finally found the word I was trying to remember: ingraphicacy (the inability to understand maps).
It's quoted in this University of Edinburgh thesis:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/richc/papers/rcox_thesis.pdf
They quote:
In 1965, for example, Balchin & Coleman wrote:
It is hoped that the concepts of graphicacy and ingraphicacy will be taken up and developed by educationists, to mould the vague idea of visual aids at large into a more integrated goal of education, and to carry it down into the earliest stages to take its rightful role as one of the essential underpinnings. (p. 947)
I couldn't find the actual Balchin & Coleman work online, though.
The librarian reference of the original work is:
Balchin, W.G.V. & Coleman, A.M. [1965] Graphicacy should be the fourth ace in the pack. The Times Educational Supplement, November 5th, 947.
NOTE: Strangely, searching for the word in Google returns mostly pages written in Spanish and Portuguese (quoted the word in English) but no use in pages written in English besides the very thesis where it's mentioned.
EDIT: As @Gnomew noted, graphicacy is indeed in the dictionary. I thought it wasn't:
In psychology, it is called doorway effect or location updating effect.
Researchers already know that walking from one space to another makes people more likely to forget tasks when compared to others who don’t make such a transition. Called “location-updating effect” the phenomenon also causes people transitioning between rooms (even virtual ones) to take more time while attempting to recall items from memory.
It happens both in virtual and real environments; and it is explained that leaving a place and entering a new one is served as an event boundary in the mind and memory refreshes itself for the new information.
This “doorway effect” appears to be quite general. It doesn't seem to matter, for instance, whether the virtual environments are displayed on a 66” flat screen or a 17” CRT. In one study, Radvansky and his colleagues tested the doorway effect in real rooms in their lab. Participants traversed a real-world environment, carrying physical objects and setting them down on actual tables. The objects were carried in shoeboxes to keep participants from peeking during the quizzes, but otherwise the procedure was more or less the same as in virtual reality. Sure enough, the doorway effect revealed itself: Memory was worse after passing through a doorway than after walking the same distance within a single room.
Best Answer
In my family (rural Australia) we have always used the term "jack-a-dandy". I can trace this back to a usage in 19th C London (sorry, reference escapes me - not my family, though.) It was an article on children's games. One boy complained that another had cast a jack-a-dandy in his eye with a mirror or similar. The trail stops there. I tracked down an earlier (?) English saying to the effect that, on a day when sun and rain alternated rapidly, "Jack-a-dandy is beating his wife with his golden stick". In Germany, in the same circumstances, it is the devil who is beating his wife. My Jamaican sister-in-law reports a similar saying in Jamaica.
Reference added:
Jack-a-dandy -- Wiktionary