Does where you grew up affect your sense of direction?

A man walks along Ste-Catherine Street in Montreal, Sunday, January 2, 2022. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes)

A new study suggests our sense of direction and navigational skills as adults are shaped by where we grew up.

The study's researchers from the Laboratoire d'Informatique en Image et Systèmes d'Information and University College London compared the performance of nearly 400,000 people from 38 different countries who played a video game called "Sea Hero Quest," which was initially developed to study Alzheimer's disease. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

To play the game, "Sea Hero Quest" players were given the chance to try to memorize the game's topographical map, and then were tasked with navigating a boat through a virtual environment to find checkpoints shown on the map.

Researchers found that the players who grew up in rural areas had a better sense of direction than those who grew up in cities. The study's authors noted that the size of the gap in navigational ability varied from country to country, but the players who reported growing up in cities in Canada and the United States were at a greater disadvantage than their rural counterparts.

Living in the country often requires greater travel for various errands and outings, the researchers noted, suggesting that this may help hone their navigational skills.

Researchers also suggest that because Canadian and American cities are often predictably designed in grid-like systems -- with streets usually intersecting at right angles and running east to west and north to south -- their navigation skills are not as developed as those who live in the country, and is also worse than those who live in more complex cities.

The study's authors found that people who grew up in cities with a convoluted or patchwork urban design, such as Paris, were able to better navigate through the game based on memory than players who grew up in large, "grid-lined" cities such as Montreal or Chicago.

"Growing up somewhere with a more complex layout of roads or paths might help with navigational skills as it requires keeping track of direction when you’re more likely to be making multiple turns at different angles, while you might also need to remember more streets and landmarks for each journey," Antoine Coutrot, the study's co-lead author, said in a press release on Wednesday.

In countries with complicated city design and lots of rural areas, such as in India, the researchers found that there was less variance in the video game players' sense of direction.

Because different levels of the game involve different-looking maps, the researchers also reviewed data on how well players did on maps that were topographically similar to the city where the player grew up. The results suggest that players did better on the levels of the game that looked the most similar to their hometowns.

Players were also asked where they currently live, but researchers said that their current place of residence did not affect their scores, suggesting that this cognitive skill is developed in childhood and/or adolescence.

According to joint senior author Michael Hornberger, a dementia researcher, "Spatial navigation deficits are a key Alzheimer's symptom in the early stages of the disease. We are seeking to use the knowledge we have gained from Sea Hero Quest to develop better disease monitoring tools, such as for diagnostics or to track drug trial outcomes. Establishing how good you would expect someone's navigational to be based on characteristics such as age, education, and where they grew up, is essential to test for signs of decline."