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When Stephanie de Silva was a child in Chicago, she discovered that the city helped her get to her destination. Streets had direction names such as “West” or “North”, and they often met at regular right angles. If all else fails, Lake Michigan could dock it.

But when Ms. de Silva, 23, moved to London, where she is now studying cognitive science, she suddenly couldn’t go to a restaurant two blocks from home without a smartphone map. The streets were mostly empty. Sometimes they seemed to be getting nowhere.

“I don’t think the main instructions exist here,” he said. “I’ve been living here for six months and I don’t know which way to look.”

Scientists in Ms. de Silva’s lab at University College London, along with colleagues in the UK and France, have now come to an explanation: people who grew up in predictable, grid-like cities like Chicago or New York seem to struggle to navigate as easily as they do. those who come from more rural areas or more complex cities.

These findings Published in Nature Wednesday suggests that people’s childhood environments not only affect their health and well-being, but also their ability to act later in life. The researchers concluded that, like language, navigation is a skill most easily molded as people’s brains develop.

The authors hope the findings will eventually lead to navigation-based tests to aid in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. They said the disappearance can sometimes occur earlier in the course of the disease than memory problems.

Researchers have developed virtual crawling tests for cognitive decline, but they can only interpret results if they know about other factors that affect people’s wayfinding abilities.

Among the forces that shape people’s navigational skills, the study suggested what kinds of places they experienced as children.

“The environment matters,” said Hugo Spiers, professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and one of the study’s lead authors. “The environment we were exposed to had a knock-on effect on cognition in the 70s.”

It took a series of unexpected events involving a cell phone company, a controversial YouTuber, and a custom-made video game to create the big dataset behind the study.

Michael Hornberger, who studied dementia at the University of East Anglia in England in 2015, heard of a company that wanted to invest in research on dementia.

Having just joined a workshop on gaming in science, she suggested a video game that could help her understand how people of different ages, genders, and locations perform on navigational tasks. Such a game, he thought, could create benchmarks for evaluating patients who may be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

Surprisingly, the company – Deutsche Telekom, a key stakeholder in T-Mobile – funded the idea. “known asSea Hero QuestThe smartphone game involved steering a boat in search of sea creatures. The company launched an advertising campaign to recruit players. Video from PewDiePieYouTube’s biggest star at the time, who was next penalized by the platform To use antisemitic language.

Scientists hoped the game would attract 100,000 people in Western Europe. Participants would test their navigation skills while also providing key demographic details such as whether they grew up in or outside the city.

Instead, more than 4.3 million people participated, creating a global database of tips on people’s ability to get around. Dr. “We underestimated the gaming world,” Hornberger said. “It went beyond our wildest dreams.”

The game is shown for all its simplicity. predict people’s ability to navigate real placesIncluding London and Paris. In recent years, the research team has used the data to show that age gradually erodes people’s navigation skills, and the gender disparity is an indicator of whether men will perform slightly better than women.

The latest study tackled what its authors describe as a more vexing question: Do cities, while grid-like, have the effect of improving people’s navigation skills by giving people multiple options for navigating? Or do people from more rural areas, where the distances between places are long and the roads winding, develop superior navigational abilities?

To find this out, the researchers analyzed game data from nearly 400,000 players from 38 countries. The effect was clear: Even as scientists adjusted for age, gender, and education level, people who reported growing up outside of the city exhibited better navigation skills than those living in the city.

The only time people got used to the more predictably arranged cities was in the simpler levels of the video game.

Players of different nationalities performed differently. Urbanites from some places, such as Spain, came very close to the navigational skills of their rural counterparts. In other countries, such as the United States, people who grew up in cities were at a huge disadvantage.

One explanation the researchers put forward was that in countries like Spain whose largest cities have complex patchwork, chaotic street layouts sharpen navigation skills. In contrast, countries known for more predictable urban designs, such as the United States, give people from out of town a greater advantage.

“If you grew up in a city like Chicago, Buenos Aires or Montreal – cities that look a lot like the grid – you don’t train your navigation skills as much as you would if you grew up in a more complex city like London or Paris, Antoine Courot, a scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and another lead author of the paper, said. where the streets are much more convoluted,” he said.

The study’s authors wrote that to address concerns that people from outside the city were only successful because the video game was set in nature, they replicated the findings in a smaller group of participants who gathered to play a different game: “City Hero Quest.” same destinations but a car instead of a boat.

For this experiment, the researchers asked more detailed background questions, including what environment the participants were currently living in. As a result, they were able to learn that people’s present-day environments do not significantly affect their performance in video games.

Dr. “This really tells you that the key period is when your brain develops,” Coutrot said. “Like when you want to learn a bit of a new language.”

The study suggested that more complex environments could help generate new neurons in the hippocampus, a brain structure important to memory. However, the authors stressed that people can still improve their navigation skills later in life.

Some of the authors also noted that street layout is not the only factor that makes navigating a city difficult or easier. Visible landmarks can be important, but are more difficult to measure for research purposes than in a street network.

Sea creature gaming has also moved away from specific questions about people’s locations, occupations, or how they move around, as part of an effort to allay privacy concerns and prevent science from interfering with the game.

This hid potentially relevant elements of one’s upbringing from the research team, or even some commentators remained skeptical for confidentiality reasons of the project. Among the unknowns was how the Global Positioning System changed people’s navigational experiences, but Dr. Spiers noted that younger participants produced results similar to those of older people.

Outside scientists said the range and number of participants was much higher than usual.

“Many different nations are represented, and many different geographical landscapes are represented,” said Amber Watts, associate professor of psychology at the University of Kansas. neighborhood layout and cognition but did not participate in the study.

It was less clear whether the cognitive benefits of more unpredictable city designs were worth the cost of making navigation more complex, including for people already struggling with disabilities.

“Does this mean we should design more cognitively challenging environments?” Dr. Watts said. “If I were to go to a city planner and tell him to make walking around a city as confusing as possible, it probably wouldn’t sell well.”

Paolo Santi, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Senseable City Lab, who was not on the “Sea Hero Quest” team, said the results brought to mind how the results would guide tourists in the Italian cities where he grew up. .

If directions in Manhattan were sometimes as simple as a few blocks away, directions in Italian cities should be more forgiving for the grill-headed tourist.

“Instead of telling you something you’ll forget, I’m just telling you to remember the first part, and when you get there, there are a lot of people who will ask again,” he said.

For a place like New York, “On the one hand, you could say the city is well designed because it’s simplified to get around the main task. On the other hand, if we don’t challenge ourselves, in a sense, we can’t use our brain’s full potential.”