The spatial contiguity principle suggests that related information sources should be spatially integrated in order to reduce attention-splitting and facilitate learning.

An example of a solved mathematical problem taking into consideration and ignoring the spatial contiguity principle is presented in image on the right. Example A shows separated text and graph (two information sources), whereas example B shows same two information sources, but this time spatially integrated. For another example see work of Florax and Ploetzner¹⁾.

Experiments have confirmed importance of this principle²⁾, yet similar results were sometimes obtained using not necessarily spatial contiguity, but segmenting text and labeling the image as key contributors to it.³⁾