Growing up in rural or suburban areas improves spatial navigation
By: News archive
People who grew up in rural or suburban areas have better spatial navigation skills than those raised in cities – according to research involving the University of East Anglia.
This is particularly the case for cities with grid-pattern streets – according to a new study led by researchers at University College London (UCL) in collaboration with UEA and the University of Lyon.
The team’s previous research had shown that people’s spatial navigation skills decline with age, starting in early adulthood.
The new study finds that people who grew up in areas with gridded streets can have comparable navigation skills to people five years their senior from rural areas, and in some areas the difference was even greater.
The study, published in Nature, involved nearly 400,000 participants from 38 countries.
They all played the Sea Hero Quest mobile phone game, which was created by Deutsche Telekom in partnership with UEA, UCL, Alzheimer’s Research and game developers Glitchers - to detect people at risk of Alzheimer’s.
Joint senior author Prof Michael Hornberger, from UEA’s Norwich Medical School, said: “We designed Sea Hero Quest because we wanted to better-understand dementia by seeing how the brain works in relation to spatial navigation.
“For the study, people played the game, which features a wayfinding task that required them to navigate a boat through a virtual environment to find checkpoints shown on a map.
“We found that where people grew up influenced their performance in the game, even after controlling for confounding effects of age, gender and education levels. Their current place of residence did not affect their scores.
“Our research also shows that people whose hometowns had grid layouts were slightly better at navigating similarly organised street patterns, despite having poorer performance overall, as early childhood environments influence not only navigation ability, but navigation styles as well.”
Lead researcher Professor Hugo Spiers (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences) said: “We found that growing up outside of cities appears to be good for the development of navigational abilities, and this seems to be influenced by the lack of complexity of many street networks in cities.
The researchers compared the home cities of the study participants by analysing the entropy (disorder) of the street networks, to gauge the complexity and randomness of the layouts.
People whose hometowns had lower entropy – ordered grid layouts like in Chicago or New York – were worse at completing the wayfinding task. Those from cities with organic, less ordered street layouts, like Prague, performed only slightly worse than those from rural areas.
To test if people from cities could more effectively navigate environments comparable to where they grew up, the researchers developed a city-themed version of Sea Hero Quest, called City Hero Quest.
This new version of the game 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 cities with grid layouts were slightly better at navigating similar environments, although the difference was not as great as their inferior performance in Sea Hero Quest.
Co-lead author Dr Antoine Coutrot from the University of Lyon said: “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.”
The Sea Hero Quest project was designed to aid Alzheimer’s research, by shedding light on differences in spatial navigational abilities. Over four million people have played the game, contributing to numerous studies across the project as a whole.
Prof Hornberger said: “Spatial navigation deficits are a key Alzheimer’s symptom in the early stages of the disease. We are seeking to use the knowledge we have gained from Sea Hero Quest to develop better disease monitoring tools, such as for diagnostics or to track drug trial outcomes.
“Establishing how good you would expect someone’s navigational to be based on characteristics such as age, education, and where they grew up, is essential to test for signs of decline.”
The scientists are continuing their research into predictors of navigational ability, including how sleep impacts navigation skill in different countries and across the life-span.
‘Entropy of city street networks linked to future spatial navigation ability’ will be published in the journal Nature on March 30, 2022.
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