Growing up outside a city may give you a better sense of direction, according to an analysis of data from the mobile video game Sea Hero Quest. The game was designed in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK to help study the mental processes involved in spatial navigation.
Antoine Coutrot at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and his colleagues analysed game data for more than 440,000 people aged 19 to 70 from 38 countries.
The data was collected while people played a level in which they had to memorise a map of the sea and then use their virtual boat to navigate to various checkpoints as quickly as possible.
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However, the researchers didn’t measure how fast players finished the task. They instead measured the trajectory of each participant’s path.
The more erratic someone’s trajectory to and from the checkpoints, the worse the researchers defined that player’s navigational skill. Previous studies carried out by the group have found a strong correlation between this measure and a participant’s real-life navigation abilities. The team corrected for video-game ability
The team also asked players their age, gender, level of education and where they grew up. Coutrot found that in every country, those who grew up in cities scored worse at navigation than their country’s other inhabitants. This effect was true for all genders, ages and levels of education.
The effect was larger in some countries than others. For example, the difference in navigation ability between city-dwellers and country-dwellers was six times worse in the US than Romania. The researchers hypothesised that one of the reasons for these differences may partly be due to how the countries’ respective cities are organised.
Using open source data, the team looked at the organisation of street networks in the 10 most populous cities in each country, analysing how grid-like each country’s cities are on average.
Cities in the US were found to be far more grid-like than those in Romania, for example. The researchers found that, in general, the more grid-like the city a person grew up in, the worse their ability to navigate in comparison to their fellow citizens. This difference in ability may be due to the different ways people travel in these environments, says Coutrot.
“When you go from one point to another in a city like Chicago, there’s a good chance you take a train or a bus – this way of transportation is very passive. The streets are also very organised, so you don’t have to memorise them and the routes you have to follow,” says Coutrot.
There are plenty of factors that affect one’s ability to navigate that still need to be investigated to figure out why growing up in less grid-like cities results in better navigational abilities, says Aidan Horner at the University of York in the UK.
Coutrot says his analysis didn’t take into account the effects of urban or rural environments a person might move to as they leave their birthplace, but he plans to study this in the future.
Reference: bioRxiv, DOI:
