Research Design Connections: Growing Up Wayfinding

by Sally Augustin, Ph.D. | July 18th, 2022

Coutrot and colleagues set out to learn more about the way where we grew up influences our sense of direction; what they learned may help explain previously baffling programming research findings. The Coutrot-led team report that “how the environment in which one grew up affects later cognitive abilities remains poorly understood. Here we used a cognitive task embedded in a video game to measure non-verbal spatial navigation ability in 397,162 people from 38 countries across the world. Overall, we found that people who grew up outside cities were better at navigation i.e., had a better sense of direction. More specifically, people were better at navigating in environments that were topologically similar to where they grew up. Growing up in cities with a low street network entropy – less heterogeneous, more grid-like (for example, Chicago) led to better results at video game levels with a regular layout, whereas growing up outside …