SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submission Preview
Where You Grew Up May Shape Your Navigational Skills
████ # This file was generated bot-o-matically! Edit at your own risk. ████
Where you grew up may shape your navigational skills [sciencenews.org]:
Score one for the country mouse.
People who grow up outside of cities are better at finding their way around than urbanites, a large study on navigation suggests. The results, described online March 30 in Nature, hint that learning to handle environmental complexity as a child strengthens mental muscles [nature.com] for spatial skills.
Nearly 400,000 people from 38 countries around the world played a video game called Sea Hero Quest, designed by neuroscientists and game developers as a fun way to glean data about people’s brains. Players piloted a boat in search of various targets.
On average, people who said they had grown up outside of cities, where they would have presumably encountered lots of meandering paths, were better at finding the targets than people who were raised in cities.
Sign Up For the Latest from Science News Client key*E-mail Address*Go
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
What’s more, the difference between city dwellers and outsiders was most prominent in countries where cities tend to have simple, gridlike layouts, such as Chicago with its streets laid out at 90-degree angles. The simpler the cities, the bigger the advantage for people from more rural areas, cognitive scientist Antoine Coutrot of CNRS who is based in Lyon, France, and his colleagues report.
Still, from these video game data, scientists can’t definitively say that the childhood environment is behind the differences in navigation. But it’s plausible. “As a kid, if you are exposed to a complex environment, you learn to find your way, and you develop the right cognitive processes to do so,” Coutrot says.
Other bits of demography have been linked to navigational performance, including age, gender, education and even a superior sense of smell [sciencenews.org] (SN: 10/16/18). Figuring out these details will give doctors a more precise baseline of a person’s navigational abilities. That, in turn, might help reveal when these skills slip, as they do in early Alzheimer’s disease, for instance.
More Stories from Science News on Humans [sciencenews.org]
- Genetics We finally have a fully complete human genome [sciencenews.org]
- Anthropology North America’s oldest skull surgery dates to at least 3,000 years ago [sciencenews.org]
- Health & Medicine ‘Vagina Obscura’ shows how little is known about female biology [sciencenews.org]
- Anthropology Social mingling shapes how orangutans issue warning calls [sciencenews.org]
- Health & Medicine How I’ll decide when it’s time to ditch my mask [sciencenews.org]
- Genetics How gene therapy overcame high-profile failures [sciencenews.org]
- Health & Medicine What do we mean by ‘COVID-19 changes your brain’? [sciencenews.org]
- Archaeology Ancient seafarers built the Mediterranean’s largest known sacred pool [sciencenews.org]
From the Nature Index Paid Content
Score one for the country mouse.
People who grow up outside of cities are better at finding their way around than urbanites, a large study on navigation suggests. The results, described online March 30 in Nature, hint that learning to handle environmental complexity as a child strengthens mental muscles [nature.com] for spatial skills.
Nearly 400,000 people from 38 countries around the world played a video game called Sea Hero Quest, designed by neuroscientists and game developers as a fun way to glean data about people’s brains. Players piloted a boat in search of various targets.
On average, people who said they had grown up outside of cities, where they would have presumably encountered lots of meandering paths, were better at finding the targets than people who were raised in cities.
Sign Up For the Latest from Science News Client key*E-mail Address*Go
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
What’s more, the difference between city dwellers and outsiders was most prominent in countries where cities tend to have simple, gridlike layouts, such as Chicago with its streets laid out at 90-degree angles. The simpler the cities, the bigger the advantage for people from more rural areas, cognitive scientist Antoine Coutrot of CNRS who is based in Lyon, France, and his colleagues report.
Still, from these video game data, scientists can’t definitively say that the childhood environment is behind the differences in navigation. But it’s plausible. “As a kid, if you are exposed to a complex environment, you learn to find your way, and you develop the right cognitive processes to do so,” Coutrot says.
Other bits of demography have been linked to navigational performance, including age, gender, education and even a superior sense of smell [sciencenews.org] (SN: 10/16/18). Figuring out these details will give doctors a more precise baseline of a person’s navigational abilities. That, in turn, might help reveal when these skills slip, as they do in early Alzheimer’s disease, for instance.
More Stories from Science News on Humans [sciencenews.org]
- Genetics We finally have a fully complete human genome [sciencenews.org]
- Anthropology North America’s oldest skull surgery dates to at least 3,000 years ago [sciencenews.org]
- Health & Medicine ‘Vagina Obscura’ shows how little is known about female biology [sciencenews.org]
- Anthropology Social mingling shapes how orangutans issue warning calls [sciencenews.org]
- Health & Medicine How I’ll decide when it’s time to ditch my mask [sciencenews.org]
- Genetics How gene therapy overcame high-profile failures [sciencenews.org]
- Health & Medicine What do we mean by ‘COVID-19 changes your brain’? [sciencenews.org]
- Archaeology Ancient seafarers built the Mediterranean’s largest known sacred pool [sciencenews.org]
From the Nature Index Paid Content
