The environment in which people grow up seems to shape the development of their orientation skills, a study shows: people who spent their childhood in more rural areas have on average better navigation skills than those who come from cities – especially those with grid-shaped ones road networks. Accordingly, the researchers explain that greater structural complexity appears to have a positive effect on the development of orientation skills.
As is well known, how and where people live can have a strong impact: numerous studies show that the cultural and geographical characteristics of the current environment influence people’s cognitive abilities and psychological well-being. On the other hand, less research has been done on how previous circumstances affected people – the environment in which people spent their childhood and adolescence. The international research team led by Hugo Spiers from University College London has now devoted itself to the aspect of people’s ability to find their way around spatially.
Their study results are based on the evaluation of data from a citizen science project of neuroscientific research, which is based on the mobile game “Sea Hero Quest”. The navigation skills of the participants are required for path-finding tasks: They have to navigate a vehicle through various virtual environments in order to find checkpoints displayed on a map. Previous research has shown that a person’s real-world navigation skills are reflected in their performance in this game.
Playfully generated data
For the current study, Spiers and his colleagues evaluated the results of almost 400,000 participants from 38 countries who played “Sea Hero Quest” or a modified form. For the citizen science project, the test subjects also provided various personal information – including where they grew up. In this way, the scientists were also able to record the structural complexity of the route system in the respective homeland. A scientific tool was used that gives access to the topology of the road network around the world.
As the researchers report, the data evaluations showed that the environment of the participants’ childhood and adolescence influenced their performance in the game, regardless of their current place of residence. Basically, they showed their best performances in virtual game environments that resembled those of their original home. The bottom line, however, is that people who grew up in cities have, on average, worse navigation skills than those originally from rural or suburban areas. The latter could also find their way comparatively well in levels of the game that had a rather complex environment. “So we showed that growing up outside of cities seems to be good for developing navigation skills,” says Spiers.
The degree of “disorder” seems formative
Further study results show that this is obviously linked to the complexity of the respective environment. The researchers compared the degree of “disorder” – the so-called entropy of the road network systems – in the home towns of the study participants. It turned out that people whose home towns have a lower entropy, i.e. comparatively ordered grid structures, were less able to solve the orientation tasks. Distinctive examples of such urban structures can be found in the USA – for example in Chicago or New York. In contrast, people who grew up in “organically” structured cities – with less orderly street layouts, such as Prague – performed only slightly worse than people who came from rural areas.
A comparison with the age factor clarifies the strength of the connection established. Because spatial orientation skills begin to dwindle relatively early in adulthood, says Spiers: “We found that people who grew up in areas with an orderly road network have comparable navigation skills to people who are five years older from rural areas,” says the Scientist.
The connection probably has something to do with a lasting training effect, say the researchers: “If you grow up in a place with a more complex road or path system, this could improve your navigation skills, since you have to keep an eye on the direction comparatively intensively. Because you have to take turns at different angles and you also have to remember more streets and landmarks,” says co-author Antoine Coutrot from the University of Lyon. According to the researchers, however, further research should now shed more light on how the effects develop in childhood.
Source: University College London, Article: Nature, doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04486-7