Your Navigational Skills Are Intricately Linked to Your Past, Research Shows

Scientists are unraveling how our environments shape our mental health and cognitive abilities. There is a link between where we grew up and our navigation skills.

People are better at navigating environments similar to where they grew up, according to an international team of researchers.

People who grew up in grid-like cities were worse at navigating less organized environments than people who grew up in more randomly designed cities.

We found that people who have grown up in cities have worse navigation skills than people who have grown up outside cities, even when controlling for age, gender, and level of education.

More than 400,000 people from 38 countries have played the video game Sea Hero Quest, which involves navigating a boat in search of sea creatures. Performance in SHQ has been shown to predict real-world navigation ability, and researchers had access to a large data set.

The players of SHQ are presented with a map that shows their start location and the locations of several checkpoint which they have to find in a set order. Researchers only used data from players who had completed at least eleven levels of the game to estimate spatial navigation ability.

Researchers created a metric to measure how complex a city's layout was. They took the data from 38 countries and calculated the street network entropy of the biggest cities. Chicago has a small SNE, while more organically dense cities have a higher one.

Growing up in cities with low SNE led to better performance at video game levels with a regular layout, while growing up outside cities or in cities with higher SNE led to better performance at more entropic video game levels, according to the authors.

The impact of the environment on human cognitive function on a global scale is confirmed by this.

There are 1,000 random trajectories in Chicago. The author is Ed Manley.

Most of the countries included in the study had similar SNE, indicative of typical organic street patterns in old city centers. Some countries have smaller SNEs than others, which is related to the layout of the city street.

There is a correlation between exploring complex environments and a positive impact on new neurons in the hippocampus in rodents, as well as research that links increased activity and volume in the hippocampus and complex spatial navigation in humans.

On the surface, it seems like common sense that people who grew up in more complex environments would have better navigation skills, but the authors point out there are likely multiple mechanisms at play when people are developing their navigation skills.

When getting about, we tend to minimize the use of streets and turns. Having to navigate irregular street layouts would likely involve having to keep a close eye on the goal direction due to the different street angles.

There were 1,000 random trajectories in the city. The author is Ed Manley.

The researchers think that having to engage these cognitive tasks would likely enhance the capacity of neural systems underlying orientation, prospective memory, and planning.

It appears that having to accommodate turns that deviate from 90 degrees and to navigate more streets and neighborhoods are key to enhancing navigation skill.

The results show that humans develop navigation strategies that are aligned with the environment they are exposed to, which can lead to sub-optimal strategies in other environments.

The journal Nature published the research.