The place where one lived as a child, significantly affects the ability to orient oneself when one grows up. People who grew up in rural or suburban areas, have better orientation and “navigation” skills in space, compared to those who grew up in citiesespecially those with a road network organized geometrically in the form of a grid with many vertical and horizontal roads.
This was concluded by a new British-French scientist research, according to which the design of cities and especially roads can affect the function of the brain and the cognitive abilities of children and consequently of adults. On the other hand, the study shows that people whose home city had a geometric layout on its streets, although generally having a worse orientation performance, are slightly better at orienting and moving to other cities with a similar geometric street organization.
Those who grew up in a city with complex topography have a better sense of orientation than those who grew up in a city with simple geometry in its spatial planning. Even adults are better oriented and do better on long journeys to unknown places when they have not grown up in a city.
The researchers from the University College London (UCL) Institute of Behavioral Neuroscience and the Claude Bernard Universities of Lyon and the East of England, led by Antoine Coutro and Hugo Spierswho made the relevant publication in the journal “Nature”analyzed data on nearly 400,000 people from 38 countries who played one on their mobile phone video game (Sea Hero Quest), suitable for neuroscientific research on dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
The game requires players to steer a boat in a digital environment, finding various points shown on a map.
The researchers also created their own version of the game (City Hero Quest), which unfolds in digital cities with different street layouts.
It has been found that where a person has grown up, plays a decisive role in his performance in the field of orientation and navigation, while on the contrary his place of residence in recent years does not play a role.
For example, those who grew up in cities with geometric street layouts such as Chicago and New York did worse in video games than those who grew up in cities like Prague with their extravagant, chaotic, and less organized streets. For reasons that are not clear, there are differences from country to country: the orientation advantage for those who grew up far from cities is much higher in countries such as Canada, the USA, Argentina and Saudi Arabia than in others such as Austria, France and India.
As he said Professor Hugo Spears of the UCL Department of Psychology“we found that those who grew up outside the cities, seems to have done them good in developing navigation skills, due to the lack of complexity in many road networks in cities. People’s ability to orient themselves in space gradually decreases with age, starting relatively early in an adult’s life. “Our study found that those who grew up in areas with grid-shaped roads may have navigation skills comparable to people in the countryside who are five years older, and in some areas the difference is even greater.”
Difficulty navigating and navigating is a major symptom in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. However, the researchers said that it is too early to conclude that life in the countryside or in remote suburbs will help against dementia, as the latter depends on many risk factors (genetics, lifestyle, etc.).
See the research here
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