Adults are unable to orient themselves – science

The teachers at Elite School told me something wonderful. The students were asked what would happen if they walked straight ahead, along the sidewalk in front of the school, without crossing the street. Few of them know that they will return to the front of the school. Since they had always been traveling around town by car, they didn’t know that the block pier forms a square, and that if you follow it, you’ll come back to the same place.

Humans are born with a tremendous ability to orient themselves in the environment in which they live. Proof of this is that the natives, in the dense tropical forests, are able to walk for days from one village to another without getting lost. But it depends on training and practice, as an example for the students of this school Sao Paulo.

What’s new is that scientists have been able to show that adults have different guiding abilities depending on where they spent their childhood. What is the guiding ability of someone who grew up in the countryside? And how does it compare to someone who grew up in cities with orthogonally organized streets (Chicago, New York) or in cities where the streets look like a maze (London, Prague)?

To be able to objectively measure the ability of thousands of adults who grew up in different environments, the scientists used the computer game “Sea Hero Quest” (SHQ), which was developed to assess Alzheimer’s patients. The player has to navigate a maze of canals or streets to move from one point to another. In each level, the challenge becomes more complex. It has already been proven that success in this game very well measures the guiding ability of healthy people in the real world.

The scientists used data from 3.9 million SHQ players and asked them to fill out a questionnaire about where they spent their childhood. Among them, 397,162 from 38 countries gave accurate answers. Maps of where these people originated were analyzed and the complexity of their architecture determined. It has been found that success in the game increases the more complex the environment in which a person grows up. Those who faced few challenges in childhood, as they lived in simple places, had less success in the game and less ability to orient themselves. It’s an important lesson: in low-complexity cities, we deprive children of developing orientation skills. But that’s fine, Waze is there to remedy this educational deficiency.

More information: Introduction of city street networks linked to future spatial navigation capability. nature https://DOI.ORG/10.1038/S41586-022-04486-7

*He is a biologist