Study Finds Humans Turn Left and Move Anticlockwise in Controlled Tests

Japanese and Spanish researchers recorded a consistent preference for turning left and moving anticlockwise among participants navigating enclosed spaces and open areas. The pattern held across age groups and cultural backgrounds and appeared whether people walked freely or reached a dead end and reversed direction. The observation emerged by chance during Covid-19 social-distancing experiments.

Professor Claudio Feliciani of the University of Tokyo’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics said colleagues noticed the counterclockwise preference in 32 out of 33 experimental trials. Researchers then ran controlled tests. In one Spanish trial, participants entered a circular enclosure 10 metres across, walked straight to the wall, and turned around.

They also moved freely inside the enclosure for 40 seconds and walked to designated points. The team tracked more than 100 Spanish schoolchildren on an open playground and conducted parallel observations at a Japanese nursery school. The anticlockwise bias appeared at the individual level and did not result from group dynamics.

The preference showed no difference between left- and right-handed participants and no variation between sexes. Children displayed a particularly pronounced tendency to move anticlockwise. The anticlockwise bias remained consistent in both Japanese and Spanish participants despite differing pedestrian customs.

Japan typically has people step left when approaching others, yet the turning preference stayed the same. Participants with one eye covered still turned anticlockwise, ruling out eye dominance. Large-scale forces such as the Coriolis effect and Earth’s magnetic field were considered unlikely explanations.

The study was published in Nature Communications. Feliciani noted that most locomotion phenomena in animals show no directional preference.