Your Navigation Skills Have Something to Do With Where You Grew Up

New research recently discovered and revealed a fascinating association between where a person grew up and his navigation skills.

As indicated in a ScienceAlert report, more and more scientists are "unraveling the ways" the environments are shaping not just an individual's mental health but also his cognitive abilities.

An international research team led by scientists from CNRS in France and the University of College London discovered that people better navigate environments topologically akin to where a person grew up.

In addition, people who grew up in grid-like cities were worse at navigating less organized environments than those in more randomly developed cities. Out-of-towners were found to be better when navigating bigger spaces than inner-city folk.

Over 390,000 People Studied Through a Video Game

In their study published in the Nature journal, the study investigators said they discovered that, on average, those who reported growing up outside cities, even when controlling for gender, level of education, and age.

Researchers gathered data stored on more than 390,000 people from 38 countries who had played the SHQ or Sea Hero Quest video game, a wayfinding game involving navigating a boat in the quest for sea creatures.

This specific task was selected since the performance in SHQ has been shown to forecast real-world navigation skills, and researchers obtained access to an extensive data set.

Essentially, SHQ players are first presented with a map specifying their start location and the location of some checkpoints they need to find in a set order.

The study investigators only utilized data from players who could complete a minimum of 11 game levels to get a reliable estimate of spatial navigation skills.

Street Network Entropy Computed

To examine any differences in spatial navigational skills, the researchers developed a metric of how complicated the layout of a city was.

They computed the street network entropy or SNE of the biggest cities in the 38 countries where participant data came from.

Grid-like cities like Chicago, for one, have a small SNE, whereas more organically sprawling cities such as Prague have a higher SNE.

In a similar report, Science News Lab said that according to the authors, they discovered that growing up in cities that had low SNE led to be "better performance at video game levels" that had a regular layout, whereas growing up outside cities or in cities that had higher SNE resulted in better performance at more entropic video game levels.

Impact of Environment on Human Cognition

This validates the effect of the environment on human cognition on a global ranking and highlights the essentiality of urban design on human cognition, not to mention brain function, added the researchers.

Findings of the research are consistent as well, with past research that has shown a link between exploration of complex environments and a positive effect on new neurons that grow in rodents' hippocampus, as well as a study that links increased activity and volume in the hippocampus and multifaceted spatial navigation in humans.

On the surface, it appears like common sense that people who grew up in more complicated environments would have better navigation skills, although the authors point out that there are likely numerous mechanisms at play when people develop their navigation skills.

Related information about the Sea Hero Quest video game is shown on AlzheimersResearch UK's YouTube video below:

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