People who grew up in rural or suburban locations have stronger spatial navigation abilities than those who grew up in cities, particularly in towns with grid-pattern streets, according to a new study led by UCL, the University of Lyon, and the University of East Anglia (UEA).
The researchers also discovered that people who grew up in cities with grid layouts were slightly better at navigating similarly organized street patterns, despite having poorer overall performance, because early childhood environments influence not only navigation ability but also navigation styles.
The study, published in Nature, included approximately 400,000 participants from 38 countries who played the Sea Hero Quest smartphone game, a citizen science endeavor produced by Deutsche Telekom in collaboration with Alzheimer’s Research UK, UCL, UEA, and game developers Glitchers.
“We found that growing up outside of cities appears to be advantageous for the development of navigational abilities, and this appears to be influenced by the lack of complexity of many street networks in cities,” stated lead researcher Professor Hugo Spiers (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences).
In our recent study, we discovered that people’s spatial navigation skills deteriorate with age, beginning in early adulthood. In this study, we discovered that people who grew up in places with gridded streets can have equivalent navigation skills to people five years their senior from rural areas, and in certain cases, the gap was much wider.
People took part in the study by playing a game with a wayfinding assignment that required them to steer a boat around a virtual environment to discover checkpoints marked on a map.
After controlling for confounding factors such as age, gender, and education level, the researchers discovered that where people grew up influenced their success in the game. However, their current location had no effect on their scores.
To assess the complexity and randomness of the layouts, the researchers compared the home cities of the study participants by assessing the entropy (or disorder) of the street networks. People from cities with lower entropy (ordered grid patterns, such as Chicago or New York) performed poorly on the wayfinding test. Those from cities with more organic, less organized street layouts, such as Prague, did only marginally worse than those from rural areas.
To see if people from cities could better navigate environments similar to where they grew up, the researchers created City Hero Quest, a city-themed version of Sea Hero Quest that required participants to drive around city streets in a virtual environment that varied from simple grids to more winding street layouts. People who grew up in towns with grid layouts performed marginally better in similar environments, though not as well as their inferior performance in Sea Hero Quest.
Growing up somewhere with a more complex layout of roads or paths might help with navigational skills as it requires keeping track of direction when you’re more likely to be making multiple turns at different angles, while you might also need to remember more streets and landmarks for each journey, said co-lead author Dr. Antoine Coutrot (CNRS, University of Lyon).
“Growing up somewhere with a more complex layout of roads or paths might help with navigational skills as it requires keeping track of direction when you’re more likely to be making multiple turns at different angles, while you might also need to remember more streets and landmarks for each journey.”
Co-lead author Dr. Antoine Coutrot
The Sea Hero Quest project aimed to advance Alzheimer’s research by gaining insight on disparities in spatial navigational ability. Over four million people have played the game, participating in several studies throughout the project.
Professor Michael Hornberger, a dementia researcher at UEA and co-senior author, stated: “Deficits in spatial navigation are a significant Alzheimer’s symptom in the early stages of the disease.” We hope to use the knowledge gathered from Sea Hero Quest to create improved disease monitoring tools, such as diagnostics or medication trial outcomes. It is critical to assess for symptoms of decline by determining how good you would expect someone’s navigation to be based on criteria such as age, education, and where they grew up.
The researchers are continuing their investigation into predictors of navigational ability, such as how sleep affects navigation skills in different nations and across the lifetime.
Alzheimer’s Study UK’s Director of Research, Dr. Susan Kohlhaas, stated: “Because of the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Sea Hero Quest, the team has been able to collect data from over four million players, amounting to approximately 2,000 hours of lab-based research. If we want to understand dementia, we need as many people as possible with various backgrounds and experiences to participate, and this study explains why.
Researchers discovered that spatial navigation differs in people with a rural background in this study, but we cannot assume that living in a rural environment will help protect against dementia. Dementia risk is a complex combination of age, genetics, and lifestyle, and where we live has a lot of health implications.
While more research is needed to unravel this complex mix of risk variables, Sea Hero Quest is an incredible illustration of how mass participation in research may help scientists come one step closer to discovery.
“Sea Hero Quest is a significant example of digital optimism in action,” said Wolfgang Kampbartold of Deutsche Telekom AG, “demonstrating the potential of innovative cross-sector partnerships, connectivity, and big data to tangibly address global societal concerns.”
