Apr 19, 2022 19:00:00

The environment in which you grew up affects your sense of direction, and people who grew up in a grid-shaped city have low navigation ability.

People's navigation abilities vary from person to person, and some people can easily reach their destination even on complicated roads, while others can easily get lost. A new international research team, led by researchers at the

French National Center for Scientific Research and University College London , announced the findings that 'the environment in which the person grew up is related to navigation ability.' Did.

Entropy of city street networks linked to future spatial navigation ability | Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04486-7

Your Navigational Skills Are Intricately Linked to Your Past, Research Shows
https://www.sciencealert.com/your-navigational-skills-are-intricately-linked-to-your-past-research-shows

Many studies have reported that the living environment affects longevity and mental health , but the effect of the growing environment on cognitive ability in later years is not well understood. Therefore, the research team conducted research on 'the effect of the environment in which they grew up on their navigation ability.'

The research team used play data from a puzzle adventure game called ' Sea Hero Quest ,' which was co-developed by Deutsche Telekom, a German telecommunications company, with a university research team. Sea Hero Quest is a game system in which a 'map containing a starting position and some checkpoints' is first presented to the player, and the player moves around the game world according to this map.

In fact, Sea Hero Quest is a game developed by Alzheimer's disease researchers to study 'how people with dementia navigate space' and can measure a player's 'navigation ability in the real world'. In addition to being shown, it is said that sufficient play data has been accumulated for research.

You can read the following articles about researching Alzheimer's disease using Sea Hero Quest.

Playing games helps early detection of Alzheimer's disease-GIGAZINE

The research team collected play data for a total of 397,162 players from 38 countries, as well as data such as player age, gender, education level, and environment in which they grew up. In addition, he devised an index 'street network entropy (SNE)' that shows how geographically complex the environment in which people grew up, and calculated the SNE of each city.

For example, as shown below, Chicago in the United States has a low SNE because the streets are in a grid pattern ...

Cities with complex roads, such as Prague in the Czech Republic, have higher SNEs.

Analysis of the data shows that players who grew up in low SNE cities get better performance in games with regular layouts, and players who grow up outside the city or in cities with high SNE perform better in more complex games. Turned out to have won. They also reported that, on average, those who said they grew up in the city had lower navigation skills than those who said they grew up outside the city, even when considering age, gender, and education level.

'Overall, we found that people who grew up outside the city had better navigation skills. More specifically, people navigate in an environment similar to where they grew up. I was good at that. '

In general, when traveling from one point to another, try to minimize the number of roads and turns you use and choose easy-to-understand directions. However, if the road layout is irregular, there are many cases where the angle of the intersection is not a right angle, so it is necessary to accurately grasp the direction of the target point by using spatial and perspective memories such as road names and corners. It will occur. Researchers speculate that people who grew up in complex cities and suburbs may be more capable of navigation in the future as they routinely engage in these cognitive tasks.

'Corresponding to non-right angles and moving more roads and areas seems to be the key to improving navigation capabilities.' 'These results depend on the type of environment humans are exposed to.' We support the theory that we are developing navigation strategies and that they are not optimal in other environments, 'the research team said.