When she was a child, she found that the city helped her get where she was going. Streets had names like West or North and they met at neat right angles. Lake Michigan was able to place her if all else failed.
When Ms. de Silva moved to London to study cognitive science, she was unable to navigate to a restaurant without a map. The streets were not straight. Sometimes they were nowhere to be found.
I don't think the directions exist here, she said.
The scientists in Ms. de Silva's lab at University College London have come up with an explanation for why people who grow up in cities like Chicago or New York seem to struggle to navigate.
The findings published in Nature suggest that people's childhood surroundings can affect their health and well-being as well as their ability to get around later in life. When people's brains are developing, navigation is a skill that is most likely to change.
The authors hope that the findings will lead to navigation-based tests for Alzheimer's disease. They said that getting lost can happen earlier in the illness than memory problems.
Virtual navigation tests for cognitive decline can only be interpreted if they know what other factors influence people's way-finding abilities.
The study suggested that the forces shaping people's navigation skills were what they experienced as a child.
Hugo Spiers is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and one of the study's lead authors.
It took a series of unlikely events, including a cellphone company, a controversial YouTuber and a custom-made video game, to generate the large data set behind the study.
Michael Hornberger heard about a company that wanted to invest in dementia research.
He proposed a video game that could help him figure out how people of different ages, genders and locations perform on navigation tasks, after attending a workshop about gaming in science. He thought that the game could be used to assess patients who might be in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.
His idea was funded by the company that is a major stakeholder in T-Mobile. The game involved steering a boat to find sea creatures. The company launched an advertising campaign that included a video from the biggest star at the time, who was later punished by the platform for using antisemitic language.
The scientists wanted the game to draw 100,000 people in Western Europe. The participants would be testing their navigation skills while also providing basic demographic details, like whether they had grown up in or outside of a city.
Over 4.3 million people joined in, generating a global database of clues about people's ability to get around.
The game has been shown to predict people's ability to get around in real places, including London and Paris. In recent years, the research team has used the resulting data to show that age erodes people's navigation skills and that gender inequality is a predictor of whether men will perform slightly better than women.
The authors of the latest study wanted to know if grids have the effect of honing people's navigation skills by giving them a lot of options for moving around. Do people from more rural areas have better navigation abilities?
The researchers studied game data from 400,000 players. The scientists found that people who reported growing up outside cities had better navigation skills than those who did not.
People used to more predictably arranged cities did better on simpler levels of the video game.
Different nationalities performed differently. Urbanites from Spain came very close to matching the navigation skills of their rural counterparts. People raised in cities were at a huge disadvantage in other nations.
The researchers suggested that chaotic street layout in countries with the biggest cities had improved navigation skills. People from outside cities have a bigger advantage when it comes to urban design.
If you grew up in a grid-like city like Chicago or Buenos Aires, you don't train as much for navigation as you would in a more complex city.
The study's authors said they replicated the findings in a smaller group of participants recruited to play a different game to address concerns that people from outside cities were only succeeding because the video game was set in nature.
The background questions for that experiment were more detailed. They learned that people's current-day surroundings did not affect their performance on the video games.
When you want to learn a new language, this is the key period.
The study suggested that more complex environments might help the formation of new brain cells. The authors said that people were able to develop navigation skills later in life.
Some of the authors said that street layout wasn't the only factor making a city harder or easier to navigate. For research purposes, visible landmarks are harder to quantify than a street network.
The sea creature game steered clear of specific questions about people's locations, professions or how they got around, as part of an effort to keep the science out of the game.
Even as some commentators remained skeptical of the project on privacy grounds, that hid potentially relevant elements of someone's upbringing from the research team. Dr. Spiers noted that younger participants produced the same results as older people when it came to their navigation experiences.
Scientists outside said that the range and number of participants were more than usual.
An associate professor of psychology at the University of Kansas who has studied neighborhood layout and cognition but was not involved in the study said that lots of different nations are represented.
It was not clear whether the cognitive benefits of more unpredictable city designs were worth the cost of making places more complicated to navigate.
If I went to an urban planners and told them to make it difficult to get around a city, that would be something.
Paolo Santi, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Senseable City Lab who was not part of the Sea Hero Quest team, said that the results called to mind how he would give directions to tourists.
If directions in Manhattan were as easy as down and over a few blocks, tourists in Italian cities would be more willing to follow grids.
He said to just remember the first part, and when you get there, there are many people to ask again.
He said that New York is designed well because it is simpler for the main task to get around. We don't fully exploit the potential of our brains if we don't challenge ourselves.
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