Education
How Good Is Your Sense of Direction?
Is it possible to guess the exact location of something just by looking at its address or cross streets? What if someone was to point out a landmark in the area, such as mountains, oceans, or a building? Or do you rely on your smartphone’s map to get you places?
Stephanie de Silva, a Chicago native, found that Chicago helped her get to where she wanted to be as a child. Streets included directional names like “West” or “North,” and they often met at neat right angles. Lake Michigan could even place her if all else fails.
Ms. de Silva, 23 years old, moved to London to study cognitive science. She couldn’t find a way to navigate to a restaurant just two blocks away from her home without a map on her smartphone. Streets were often confusing. Sometimes they seemed to go nowhere.
“I don’t think the cardinal directions exist here,” she said. “I’ve lived here for six months now, and I don’t know which direction I’m facing.”
Scientists in Ms. de Silva’s lab at University College London, along with colleagues in Britain and France, have now arrived at an explanation: People who grow up in predictable, gridlike cities like Chicago or New York seem to struggle to navigate as easily as those who come from more rural areas or more intricate cities.
Those findings, published in Nature, suggest that people’s childhood surroundings influence not only their health and well-being but also their ability to get around later in life. Much like language, navigation is a skill that appears to be most malleable when people’s brains are developing, the researchers concluded.
The authors hope the findings eventually lead to navigation-based tests to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. They said that sometimes memory problems can lead to getting lost earlier than the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers have developed virtual navigation tests for cognitive decline, but they can interpret the results only if they know what other factors influence people’s way-finding abilities.
Among the forces shaping people’s navigation skills, the study suggested, was what kind of places they experienced as a child.
“The environment matters,” said Hugo Spiers, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and one of the study’s lead authors. “The environment we’re exposed to has a knock-on effect, into the 70s, on cognition.”
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