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Urban dwellers are poorer navigators: research

According to a research released on Wednesday, those who grew up in the country have a superior sense of direction and navigational abilities than those who grew up in cities.

Scientists studied the behavior of around 400 000 participants from 38 nations who participated in a mobile video game intended for neuroscience study in order to determine how childhood environment effects navigation skills.

According to the findings of a research published in the journal Nature, players of the “Sea Hero Quest” game had to sail a boat in order to locate checkpoints on a map.

Hugo Spiers of University College London, the study’s principal author, said, “We discovered that growing up outside of cities seems to be beneficial for the development of navigational skills, and this appears to be impacted by the lack of complexity of many street networks in cities.”

According to co-lead author Antoine Coutrot of the University of Lyon, previous research had shown that when mice were raised in cages with paths of varying complexity, “certain cognitive capacities in their brains, including spatial navigation, were also modified.” Coutrot’s research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Humans, on the other hand, were more difficult to examine since “we cannot lock them up in cages,” as he explained to AFP.

Thus, the researchers turned to “Sea Hero Quest,” an online game that was developed in 2016 to investigate Alzheimer’s illness and has been played about four million times since then.

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People who grew up in rural regions, according to Coutrot, performed better because “the countryside is a somewhat complicated setting in that it is quite unorganised, with bigger distances, requiring you to memorize your path.”

People who grew up in more complicated cities, such as Paris and Prague, performed far better than those who grew up in places with ordered grid-based street patterns, such as Chicago, he said.

Adults, on the other hand, may still enhance their sense of direction later in life if they put in the effort.

Coutrot expressed himself as follows:

It’s similar like learning a new language, which will be considerably simpler if you study it when you’re young and have a strong foundation.

The researchers also created a new version of the game, dubbed “City Hero Quest,” in order to see how well city inhabitants performed in their native surroundings.

People who grew up in cities performed much better in grid street patterns than those who grew up in the country – but the difference was nowhere like as significant as it was the other way around.

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